The documentation tells you to name variables based on what they contain. So naturally, if your variable contains an object, you should call it [object Object] . You know, because that's what JavaScript returns when you try to convert an object to a string. Perfect naming convention, right? The joke here is that "" + {} is JavaScript's delightful way of coercing an empty object into a string, which gives you the utterly useless "[object Object]" . It's the programming equivalent of asking someone their name and they respond with "I am a person." Every JavaScript developer has seen this cursed string in their console at least a hundred times, usually when they forgot to properly stringify something. It's become the universal symbol of "oops, I didn't handle this object correctly."