Lego, officially trademarked LEGO, is a line of construction toys manufactured by the Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, "Lego", have consisted of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings and even working robots. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects. Kits are sold which contain all necessary pieces for a particular project. Some hobbyists try to collect, buy, and sell various other pieces in different shapes and colors, to construct other hobbyist-created designs. The toys were originally designed in the 1940s in Europe and have achieved an international appeal, with an extensive subculture that supports Lego movies, games, competitions, and four Lego-themed amusement parks.

Early history

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund, Denmark. Christiansen began creating wooden toys in 1932; the company began calling itself "Lego" two years later in 1934. The company expanded to producing plastic toys in 1940. In 1949, Lego began producing the now-famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks." These bricks were based largely on the design of Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were released in the UK in 1947. The first Lego bricks, manufactured from cellulose acetate, were developed in the spirit of traditional wooden blocks that could be stacked upon one another; however, these plastic bricks could be "locked" together. They had several round "studs" on top, and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they could not be pulled apart.

The company name Lego was coined by Christiansen from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well". The name could also be interpreted as "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin, though this would be a somewhat forced application of the general sense "I collect; I gather; I learn"; the word is most used in the derived sense, "I read". The cognate Greek verb "λέγω" or "lego" also means "gather, pick up", but this can include constructing a stone wall.

The Lego Group's motto is "Only the best is good enough", a free translation of the Danish phrase Det bedste er ikke for godt. This motto was created by Ole Kirk to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly. The motto is still used within the company today.