How did L. Frank Baum come up with the name “OZ”?
When asked the country’s name by a child he was first telling the story to, looked to his filing cabinet in the next room, which had two drawers. One drawer was marked A-N, and one marked O-Z. So he called it “Oz” after the letters on the second drawer. While this story has been told many times, there seems to be little evidence that it’s true. Baum himself told at least two different versions of this story. Others have speculated that it comes from the “Oohs” and “Aahs” his stories produced from readers and listeners. Still others, looking for hidden meaning in the book, claim it comes from the abbreviation for ounces, or have linked it to Uz (Job’s home in the Bible), Shelly’s “Ozymandius,” or Charles Dickens’ pseudonym Boz. But L. Frank Baum’s widow, Maud, once wrote to writer Jack Snow on this subject and stated that it was just a name that Frank had created out of his own mind.
