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lego Banner logo This November is Wikipedia Asian month. Join the contest and win a postcard from Asia. [Help with translations!]Hide Page semi-protected Listen to this article Lego From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search This article is about the construction toy. For the company, see The Lego Group. For other uses, see Lego (disambiguation). Lego LEGO logo.svg Logo of Lego since 1998 Type Construction set Inventor(s) Ole Kirk Christiansen Company The Lego Group Country Denmark Availability 1949–present Official website Lego (/ˈlɛɡoʊ/ LEG-oh, Danish: [ˈleːko];[1][2] stylised as LEGO) is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks accompanying an array of gears, figurines called minifigures, and various other parts. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways to construct objects, including vehicles, buildings, and working robots. Anything constructed can be taken apart again, and the pieces reused to make new things.[3][4] The Lego Group began manufacturing the interlocking toy bricks in 1949. Movies, games, competitions, and six Legoland amusement parks have been developed under the brand. As of July 2015, 600 billion Lego parts had been produced.[5] In February 2015, Lego replaced Ferrari as Brand Finance's "world's most powerful brand".[6] Contents 1 History 1.1 In popular culture 2 Design 3 Manufacturing 4 Lego set themes 4.1 Robotics themes 5 Clones of Lego 6 Related services 6.1 Official website 6.2 Theme parks 6.3 Retail stores 6.4 Business consultancy 7 Related products 7.1 Video games 7.2 Board games 7.3 Films and television 7.4 Books and magazines 7.5 Children's clothing 8 References 8.1 Bibliography 9 External links History Main articles: History of Lego and Lego timeline Hilary Fisher Page's Interlocking Building Cubes of 1939 Lego bricks Two Lego Duplo bricks with a standard brick for comparison The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891–1958), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.[7][8] In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", derived from the Danish phrase leg godt [laɪ̯ˀ ˈkɒt], which means "play well". In 1947, Lego expanded to begin producing plastic toys.[9] In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now familiar interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which had been patented in the United Kingdom in 1939[10] and released in 1947. Lego had received a sample of the Kiddicraft bricks from the supplier of an injection-molding machine that it purchased.[11] The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate,[12] were a development of the traditional stackable wooden blocks of the time.[9] The Lego Group's motto is det bedste er ikke for godt which means "the best is not too good".[8] This motto, which is still used today, was created by Christiansen to encourage his employees never to skimp on quality, a value he believed in strongly.[8] By 1951 plastic toys accounted for half of the Lego company's output, even though the Danish trade magazine Legetøjs-Tidende ("Toy Times"), visiting the Lego factory in Billund in the early 1950s, felt that plastic would never be able to replace traditional wooden toys.[13] Although a common sentiment, Lego toys seem to have become a significant exception to the dislike of plastic in children's toys, due in part to the high standards set by Ole Kirk.[14]