In a similar vein: When the Electric Light Orchestra’s debut album was released in the United States in 1972, it was initially titled No Answer – because somebody misunderstood a note about a telephone message left with a United Artists’ exec.
Lane Bryant- founded by a Lena, whose name was misspelled by a bank official.
There are plenty of cases of names that were “properly” transcribed using a transliteration scheme that’s nonstandard. But most people are unaware of the scheme used, and end up mispronouncing the name. That’s not exactly a “typo that became official”, because there was no error in the first place. Examples include Pago Pago, which is properly pronounced “Pango Pango”, because the “n” in that situation is “understood”, and so didn’t need the extra letter. Kind of the way the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki Romanization of Japanese renders it “tu” while the more phonetic Hepburn insists on “tsu”, because there’s always that “s” sound between “t” and “u” in Japanese (unless it’s a foreign word).
American Indian languages in upstate New York did this, too, with “Nunda” being pronounced “Nun-day” instead of the expected “Nun-duh”, for instance.
A number of these answers (ELO’s “No Answer,” the SR-71, etc.) are repeats of answers already given. Please read the thread through before you post.
Similarly, The Alan Parsons Project got its name when the record label kept pestering Parsons and his colleagues for a name for the group as they were working on their first album. They couldn’t or wouldn’t come up with one, so the label just assigned its in-house shorthand name to them, and it stuck.