About Jeep
Jeep is an automobile marque (and registered trademark) of Chrysler. It is the oldest Sports utility vehicle (SUV) brand, with Land Rover coming in a close second.
Many people treat the word "jeep" as a generic term and use it uncapitalised for any vehicle of this shape and function: see genericised trademark.
History
The origin of the term "jeep"
There are many stories about where the word "jeep" came from. Although they make for interesting and memorable tales, they are difficult to verify.
Probably the most popular notion has it that the vehicle bore the designation "GP" (for "General Purpose"), which was phonetically slurred into the word jeep. R. Lee Ermey, on his television series Mail Call, disputes this, saying that the vehicle was designed for specific duties, was never referred to as "General Purpose", and that the name may have been derived from Ford's nomenclature referring to the vehicle as GP (G for government-use, and P to designate its 80-inch wheelbase). "General purpose" does appear in connection with the vehicle in the WW2 TM 9-803 manual, which describes the vehicle as "... a general purpose, personnel, or cargo carrier especially adaptable for reconnaissance or command, and designated as ¼-ton 4x4 truck", and the vehicle is designated a "GP" in TM 9-2800, Standard Military Motor Vehicles, September 1, 1949, but whether the average jeep-driving GI would have been familiar with either of these manuals is open to debate.
This version of the story may be confused with the nickname of another series of vehicles with the GP designation. The Electro-Motive Division of General Motors, a maker of railroad locomotives, introduced its "General Purpose" line in 1949, using the GP tag. These locomotives are commonly referred to as Geeps, pronounced the same way as "Jeep".
