Imagine sitting across from a federal trademark examiner and, with a completely straight face, arguing that your client owns the word the. Not a brand. Not a slogan. Not a clever portmanteau. Just the. Three letters. A definite article. The most frequently used word in the entire English language.
Somebody had to do it. And then somebody else showed up and said: actually, we were here first.
How This Even Started
In August 2019, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a professional NFL franchise with an entire marketing department, a legal team, and presumably at least one person whose job it is to think things through — filed an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the word "THE" as a trademark on clothing merchandise.
Photo: Tampa Bay Buccaneers, via logos-world.net
The application wasn't a joke. It wasn't a publicity stunt. It was a legitimate federal filing, submitted in full seriousness, for exclusive commercial rights to a word that appears roughly once every twelve words in written American English.
The USPTO, to its credit, did not immediately burst into laughter. Instead, it did what any functioning bureaucracy does with a genuinely unprecedented filing: it went looking for conflicts.
It found one almost immediately.
Enter Ohio State
Ohio State University — officially The Ohio State University, a distinction its alumni will remind you of unprompted — had actually filed its own trademark application for the word "THE" back in 2019 as well, just months before the Buccaneers. OSU's application covered apparel merchandise, the same category the Buccaneers were targeting.
Photo: Ohio State University, via content.presspage.com
For context, Ohio State has made its definite article something of an institutional identity. The school's official name includes the word as a deliberate, capitalized, emphasized component. Students wear it on hats. The university has built an entire merchandising culture around the idea that they are not merely an Ohio State — they are The Ohio State.
So when the Buccaneers came in trying to stake their own claim on the same three letters, the USPTO found itself refereeing what might be the most philosophically absurd intellectual property dispute in American legal history.
What Federal Trademark Law Actually Says
Here's where it gets genuinely strange. Under US trademark law, you can technically trademark common words — including extremely common ones — if you can demonstrate that consumers associate that word specifically with your brand in a commercial context. That's why "Apple" is a registered trademark for computers, even though apples are a fruit that existed long before Steve Jobs.
The legal standard is called acquired distinctiveness or secondary meaning: proving that the public, when they see your word on merchandise, thinks of you rather than the word itself.
Ohio State's argument was that when fans see "THE" printed on a gray crewneck sweatshirt in scarlet block letters, they don't think about grammar. They think about Columbus, Ohio, and Saturday afternoons in the Horseshoe stadium. The university claimed it had spent years building that association through consistent, recognizable merchandising.
Photo: Horseshoe stadium, via www.mlive.com
The Buccaneers' argument was essentially the same, applied to Tampa Bay's brand.
The USPTO had to decide, with genuine legal seriousness, which organization had a stronger claim to a word that predates both football and universities by roughly a thousand years.
The Resolution — Sort Of
After years of procedural back-and-forth, Ohio State and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers reached a coexistence agreement in 2022. The deal essentially allowed both parties to use "THE" as a trademark in their respective merchandise categories without directly competing. Ohio State's application moved forward. The Buccaneers' path remained complicated but alive.
In 2022, Ohio State's trademark for "THE" on clothing was officially approved by the USPTO — making a public university in the Midwest the closest thing America has to a legal owner of the English language's most common word.
Why This Is More Than Just Absurd
It would be easy to file this story under "things that happened because lawyers exist" and move on. But the Ohio State trademark case actually exposes something genuinely interesting about how intellectual property law functions in America.
Trademark law was designed to prevent consumer confusion — to stop one company from pretending to be another. It was never really built to handle a world where brand identity becomes so deeply embedded in culture that even function words start to carry commercial weight.
When Ohio State insists on being The Ohio State, it's making a cultural argument that has real economic stakes. Millions of dollars in licensed merchandise flow from that brand identity every year. From a purely commercial standpoint, protecting that word in that context isn't entirely crazy.
From a linguistic standpoint, though? Owning the is roughly equivalent to trademarking punctuation. It's the verbal equivalent of a real estate developer trying to buy the concept of walls.
And yet here we are. Somewhere in a federal trademark registry, a university in Ohio has a legally recognized claim on a word your third-grade teacher taught you was just filler.
The English language, apparently, was not consulted.
