At a conference on pulsars at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1967, John Wheeler was arguing that at the center of these objects there could exist what he called, awkwardly at length, a "completely gravitationally collapsed object". Tired of repeating the expression, he asked the audience out loud if anyone had a better name; someone in attendance suggested: "How about black hole?". Wheeler immediately recognized that the term — which he had been searching for for months, as he later recounted — was exactly right, and formally adopted it a few weeks later in a public lecture in December 1967, including it in the written version published in spring 1968. The episode's importance transcends mere linguistic anecdote: before this term's adoption, the object was variously known as a "collapsed star", "frozen star", or "Schwarzschild singularity", names that failed to capture the central physical property — the existence of an event horizon from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Wheeler, who had already earlier coined the term "geon" to describe hypothetical self-confined configurations of gravitational and electromagnetic energy, and who would later coin "wormhole" and "quantum foam", had a recognized track record of giving memorable, conceptually precise names to phenomena in general relativity, thereby contributing not only original physical ideas but the very language in which 20th-century theoretical physics came to think about extreme gravity.