Tobias Ratschiller, then an IT consultant and later founder of the software company Maguma, started to work on a PHP-based web front-end to MySQL in 1998, inspired by Peter Kuppelwieser's MySQL-Webadmin. He gave up the project (and phpAdsNew, of which he was also the original author) in 2000 because of lack of time.
By that time, phpMyAdmin had already become one of the most popular PHP applications and MySQL administration tools, with a large community of users and contributors. In order to coordinate the growing number of patches, a group of three developers, Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle and Loïc Chapeaux, registered the phpMyAdmin project at SourceForge.net and took over the development in 2001. Since 2015 the development is completely based on GitHub.
The phpMyAdmin name is obviously a mixture of PHP as the language it uses, MySQL as the database it manages and administration as the activity it handles. Even though the name seems to be quite simple, many people mix it up and they refer to phpMyAdmin under different names, such as myphpadmin, phpadmin, phpmysqladmin (these are the three most frequent Google searches going to this website aside from the correctly spelled variant).