When I was young they were a mythical creature, a horse with one horn on it’s head, hence the prefix Uni.
I see the word bandied around in the digital world whether it’s referring to companies & now job titles.
It's origins were in 2013 by VC Aileen Lee to describe a start up company worth over $1billion then there were only 39 companies.Now in 2017 there are 223. The reason they were called unicorns I was trying to come up with a word that would make it easier to use over and over again,” Lee said So I put in ‘unicorn’ because they are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They’re really rare.”
They don’t seem to be so rare anymore anymore expecially when we have 223 that are unicorns.
For children, Unicorns are still magical mythical creatures and now the beauty of the English language and history is used in my view incorrectly. We should be careful in what words we bring into the evolving digital landscape. If a child was to ask me now what a Unicorn was, should I tell her it’s a tech company or a mythical creature that fuels imagination and creativity?