“The Apple Human Interface Guidelines officially refer to it as the “spinning wait cursor”; its colloquial names include “hypnowheel”[1], “spinning starlight mint of doom”, “pride swirl”, “spinning pizza”[2], “spinning pinwheel”, “pinwheel of death”, “rainbow ball of doom”, “the beach ball of hell”[3], “spinning beach ball of death”,[4] “Spinning beach ball of impending doom”, “spinning wheel of death”, “colorful wheel of thought”, “rainbow wheel of death”,[5] and “marble of doom”[6]. The suffix “of death” in these names is a reference to Microsoft Windows’ Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which also leads to the acronym “SPOD” for “spinning pizza of death,” commonly used in mailing lists such as Mac-L.[7] The suffix ‘of doom’ is also commonly used.
