optikhit
Photo gear player
Nothing special but I am just wondering why the lenses were named by something ended by AR, such as Tessar, Skopar, Xenar, Haponar, Heliar, APO-Lanthar, Planar, Xenotar, Sonnar, Voigtar...and etc. Does any friend know the story behind? 
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FallisPhoto
Veteran
Nothing special but I am just wondering why the lenses were named by something ended by AR, such as Tessar, Skopar, Xenar, Haponar, Heliar, APO-Lanthar, Planar, Xenotar, Sonnar, Voigtar...and etc. Does any friend know the story behind?
There are also a bunch of -ON lenses and even a few -OR lenses (Hektor, Yashikor, Dagor, and so on). I don't think the -OR lens names mean anything. The Hektor lens, for instance, was named after the lens designer's dog. In the case of the -AR and -ON lenses it is pretty simple though. For some reason, nearly all of the European lens names are based on ancient Greek (Planar = flat plane, Heligon = sun, Tessar = 4, and so on). I'm fairly certain that the -AR and -ON suffixes designate gender.
Al Kaplan
Veteran
Boy lenses and Girl lenses?
MartinP
Veteran
Aha, so that explains where lens-babies came from . . . .
(it is the brand-name for a range of supplementary lens for SLRs)
sweathog
Well-known
I like that.
optikhit
Photo gear player
Haha... it is interesting. But which one is boy and which one is girl?
-ON for boy?
FallisPhoto
Veteran
Sorry, but I don't remember. It has been a l-o-n-g time since I studied any ancient Greek. I was more into Latin at the time.
FallisPhoto
Veteran
In the same way that in French everything has a gender. As in une ami, where une = feminine and ami = friend, or un ami, where un = masculine. Then there are the prefixes la and le, where la = feminine and le = masculine. The most confusing part of learning French was deciding whether something like a table was masculine or feminine. Is it la table or le table? Rather than go through learning a whole new set with Greek, I switched to Latin.