Where did the name "Ghibli" come from?

The name was chosen by Hayao Miyazaki himself. He took it from the Italian noun ghibli, the nickname of Italy's Saharan scouting plane, the Caproni Ca.309. The plane's name in turn comes from the Italianization of the Libyan Arabic name for a hot desert wind, qibliyy.

Two reasons are documented. The first is Miyazaki's lifelong passion for aircraft, the same passion that fills the films themselves with flight. The second is a promise: the idea was that the studio would "blow a new wind through the anime industry." The studio's history is recorded in the same spirit, as an intent to blow a whirlwind into a stagnating Japanese animation industry by making original, high quality feature films.

The name the world uses is not quite the word Miyazaki borrowed. In Italian the word carries a hard g, and it would be more accurately transliterated as Giburi. The studio's name is written in Japanese as Jiburi, with the soft sound most of the world now uses. The borrowed word kept its meaning and lost its pronunciation on the way in, and the record prints both facts without treating either as a mistake to be corrected.

The timing completes the picture. Studio Ghibli was founded on June 15, 1985, by Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and producer Toshio Suzuki, with support from Suzuki's publisher Tokuma Shoten, after acquiring the assets of the studio Topcraft. It was founded after the success of a film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, that was not made by Studio Ghibli at all. The name was chosen for a studio that its most famous early film predates.