French engineer named bikini after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, the site of the Operation Crossroads nuclear weapon tests in July that year. The reasoning was that the burst of excitement created by it would be like a nuclear device. The monokini, a bikini variant, is a back formation from bikini, interpreting the first syllable as the Latin prefix bi- meaning "two" or "doubled", and substituting for it mono- meaning "one".Jacques Heim called his bikini precursor the Atome, named for its size, and Louis R��ard claimed to have "split the Atome" to make it smaller.