How Burger King's Whopper Got Its Iconic Name

There are plenty of fast food chains that sell hamburgers, but there aren't as many with a bona fide, capital-I Iconic flagship burger. There's McDonald's with its Big Mac, there's Burger King with its Whopper, and then there's ... what? The Baconator at Wendy's? Clearly, branding a burger isn't as easy as slapping some patties on a bun and giving it a whimsical name, so credit is due to Burger King for making the Whopper a genuine celebrity. 

Declaring their chain the "Home of the Whopper," creating a game-changing vegan "Impossible Whopper," writing that infernal jingle that follows you like an ancient curse from one college football game to the next ... well, at least we won't forget the name anytime soon. But where did the name "Whopper" come from? According to the guy who invented it, it was supposed to sound big.

Back when the Whopper was first created in 1957, Burger King wasn't competing with McDonald's or Wendy's. In fact, it was competing against another restaurant just down the road in Gainesville, Florida, which was selling a jumbo-sized burger to great success despite being an altogether shabbier establishment than Burger King. Jim McLamore, Burger King's co-founder, wanted to get in on the action, so he created a big hamburger with all the trimmings and called it the "Whopper," as that would get across its sheer size. Soon, the Whopper was being sold for 37 cents(!) all over the state — and then, eventually, all over the world.

You might assume that the invention of the Whopper would result in a fast food arms race, with other big chains putting their finest minds on the case of making the biggest burgers possible. And, well, they kind of did, but it took a while. McDonald's didn't introduce the Big Mac until a decade after the Whopper, and that was more a case of McDonald's taking the double-decker hamburger innovation from onetime fast food stalwart (and favorite of the late David Lynch) Big Boy.

Eventually, other chains would try to rip off the Whopper, more specifically, often by using the delightful turn of phrase "Whopper stopper." There was McDonald's, of course, whose Quarter Pounder was introduced across the country in 1973, 16 years after McLamore's creation. But the Golden Arches also made a few more self-conscious attempts at imitating Burger King's flagship product, without much success — you don't usually hear about the Arch Deluxe or the Big n' Tasty these days. Wendy's tried to get in on the action with the Big Bacon Classic, now mostly known as the predecessor to today's Baconator, and Hardee's forerunner Burger Shef offered something called the Big Shef –  but at the end of the day, there's still only one Whopper.