An IT-etymology/linuxguistics page for people wondering "how come the package yasysmand-cling has such a strange name?"

Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition, and the explanations are often missing from the documentation, either because the developers imagine it's obvious (usually wrongly) or because they think nobody cares (and here they're usually right, or it would turn up as FAQ material).

Suggested guidelines for adding to the list:

  1. it's only for software that's in Debian (preferably Stable/Testing main), and it's alphabetical by binary package;
  2. xyzutils doesn't need an entry here if XYZ is genuinely self-evident or explained in the package description;

  3. it is okay if the explanation boils down to "arbitrary nonsense-word" or "random cool animal".

See Wikipedia for lists of etymologies for general computer jargon and company names (yes, "Debian" appears in both!)

Jump to: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

abiword

the word processor designed for AbiSource's AbiSuite, where "abi(erto)" is Spanish for "open"

agave
a palette-coordinating tool, previously known as Colorscheme; but that gave the wrong impression of its functionality, hence the switch to something completely uninformative - the agave isn't exactly renowned for its beauty, though I suppose the "G" might hint at a GNOME connection

aisleriot
solitaire; an anagram

akonadi-*
KDE PIM service; the name (with a "K" in it) of a Ghanaian goddess (of justice and protection)

alacarte
previously the Simple Menu Editor for Gnome. Some may see why that was renamed; the new version is intended to convey the idea of picking things off the menu

alpine

Apache-Licensed PINE, where pine was the old (non-DFSG-free) "Program for Internet News and E-mail" - but originally "Pine Is Nearly Elm", named after a yet older ELectronic Mail program

amarok

a music player for KDE named after a Mike Oldfield album which is named in turn after an Inuit word for "wolf" - so definitely a "cool animal"

amavisd-new

Now the only surviving version of "a mail virus scanner"

anjuta

GNOME IDE named after its designer's girlfriend

ant

Apache's Java build tool; an appropriate animal justified as "Another Neat Tool"

apache
A self-deprecatory nickname rather than a completely arbitrary nonsense word: originally Apache Server was A Patchy Server (in that it started as a collection of patches to the NCSA httpd).

apt

"APT" is just a random sequence of letters, not an acronym for either Advanced Package Tool or (the slightly less apt alternative) Advanced Packaging Tool.

atomicparsley
(MPEG-4 metadata editor) "atoms" are the building blocks of MPEG-4 container units, and "parsley" is a reference to garnishing files with extra information and/or a pun on "parser"

avahi-*
a zeroconf implementation; the obscure animal name struck a developer as cool

B

bacula

I suppose you could argue that it comes out at night and sucks your company's lifeblood over the network, but it really is just an excruciating pun on backups and Dracula (slightly excused by the spin-off acronym of the Bacula Admin Tool)

balsa

a GNOME mailclient, named in the tradition of pine and elm (see alpine)

baobab

(the GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer) a bloaty tree

basenji
media search tool named after a hunting dog (successor to beagle)

bc

originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"

biomaj

a biological database updater; for francophones it's obvious that mise-à-jour means "update/up-to-date".

bombono-dvd

(DVD authoring tool) originally "the Atom Project", to indicate its technical simplicity. When it grew an easy user interface it changed its name to the Esperanto for "bon-bon". (http://www.bombono.org/cgi-bin/wiki/About)

brasero
(CD-burner) from the Spanish for "heater" - i.e. a burner

bsd*
a few packages have names beginning with BSD not to indicate that they are specific to the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ports but to signal that Linux distros originally inherited them from (the earliest clearly free versions of) the Berkeley Software Distribution

bugzilla*

originally the bugtracking tool used by Netscape for Mozilla, Chatzilla, etc, so the -zilla part isn't intended to carry its usual negative connotations ("huge, monstrous, and uncontrollably destructive")

C

caca-utils

libcaca pretends to be an acronym for "Color AsCii Art", but really it's self-deprecating code

chromium
web browsers on Linux spent a decade going through a cycle of slick new slimline web browsers gradually getting buried in creeping features until they were as weighed down with chrome grills and ornamental fins as a fifties US car, at which point everyone would switch to some new minimalist alternative. Meanwhile, programmers got used to thinking of these GUI widgets as "chrome", which explains why Google whould choose to advertize their browser as if it was manufactured entirely out of deadweight bling...

clisp

Common Lisp, originally a LISt-Processing language

clive

must be a Command-Line-Interface Video-Extractor (because it certainly isn't a Virtual Environment written in the .NET Common Language Infrastructure)

conky-*
system monitor; named after an evil dummy character in the Canadian mockumentary TV series "Trailer Park Boys"

coreutils

the package itself has a clear name, but its contents include many relics from the good old days when <lies>computers couldn't hold a command in memory if its name was over five letters long</lies>:

  • dd: on IBM system/360 mainframes, the Job Control Language used a dd-like syntax to create a Dataset Definition

  • mknod: originally created any sort of "file system node"; nowadays of extremely limited usefulness

  • uname: short for "Unix name", which makes it bizarre that the version now standard comes from a project that's explicitly Not Unix...

cpio

the archiving tool does indeed "copy in/out", but this package also includes an executable that's harder to guess the function of: "mt-gnu", the GNU version of the magnetic tape manipulation tool.

crm114

a reference to Dr Strangelove (where an oversensitive CRM114 Discriminator causes the nuclear apocalypse) partly justified by the backronym "controllable regex mutilator"

D

dbus
Yes, it's a "message bus", but what's that when it's at home? The answer is that it's a data transport system - a standard software engineering technical term coined by analogy with hardware "buses" such as PCI, which are themselves named after electrical-engineering "busbars", which got their name in the days when the omnibus was the latest in transport technology. Third-generation jargon! Meanwhile, although it's nowhere to be seen in the official docs, Wikipedia claims the "D" stands for Desktop.

dconf-*

a replacement for GConf (the GNOME Configurator), where the "D" may stand for D-Bus or directly for "Desktop"; not connected to the package "dconf" where it's D for Distributed.

drupal*

PHP blog engine; mangled Dutch for "droplet", named after the (former) online community at drop.org, which in turn was originally a typo for "dorp", village (so it's double Dutch)

E

ekiga

VoIP client formerly known as GnomeMeeting; allegedly "ekiga" was "inspired by an old communication system coming straight from Cameroon" (though Google has never heard of any such thing... maybe they were thinking of the well-known communications system of "Chinese Whispers"?)

emacs*

originally a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor; see also xemacs

enchant
a wrapper for spellchecking systems named as a pun on "spelling"

epiphany-*

GNOME web browser; the word means "a moment of insight or (mystical) revelation", so maybe it's just a fancy way of saying "it's an idea I had"

erlang

a programming language either named after a Danish mathematician/engineer or after the fact it's a language originally developed by Ericsson (for telephony)

etherape

a packetsniffer punningly named after the Windows-only EtherMan, where "Man" was short for man-in-the-middle. Not connected to "the Ether Man", the media nickname for a serial rapist

evolution

(GNOME groupware) inherited from Ximian, where it fits in with their primatological theme.

evince
(document viewer) swanky word for "show"

exfalso

Tag editor for quodlibet. "Ex falso quod libet" is Latin for "from a falsehood, whatever you please" (a principle of classical logic).

exim*

originally "EXperimental Internet Mailer"

F

fcitx

originally the free Chinese input toy for X; but that was never a very good name and has become increasingly inaccurate, so we are now permitted to understand it as standing for anything we like, such as maybe "Friendly Customizable Interaction Tool for uniX", or maybe "Flexible Character Indication Technology for... Xenography".

file-roller

GNOME archive manager; the association with compression implies that it was named in the part of the anglophone world where people talk about "(road-)rollers" rather than always calling them "steamrollers".

fort77

a front-end to invoke the venerable FORmula TRANslating programming language, as standardized in 1977 (or arguably 1978!)

flite
"festival lite", because it's a lightweight alternative to the Festival Speech Synthesis System (originally developed at the University of Edinburgh)

fuse*

Some of these packages are more up-front than others about the fact it stands for filesystem-in-userspace, which is not so much an acronym as a pair of jargon terms smushed together. Maybe it would have been called u-mount if that wasn't already taken.

fvwm

nobody knows what the "F" stands for, but the most popular arbitrary retrofit is that it's the "feline" virtual window manager.

G

G usually stands directly or indirectly for GNU (which stands for GNU); GTK for instance is the GIMP ToolKit (where "gimp" is the GNU Image Manipulation Program)

gamin

francophone wordplay: first there was the File Alteration Monitor, then (because "fam" is short for "family") its child projects were called "marmot" and "gamin" (both of which mean something like "kid", "brat")

gcompris
(educational games) another French pun: "G Compris" = "j'ai compris" = "I understand"

geeqie

a fork of gqview (punning on "geeky")

ghostscript

a punning name for a GPLed alternative to Adobe PostScript

gir*

GIR is the GObject introspection repository; "type introspection" lets objects provide metadata about themselves, but the main influence on this name is probably the fact that "Gir" is an Invader Zim reference.

git

(distributed VCS) semi-arbitrary short word

gitalist

web viewer for git based on Catalyst

gnat

(the GCC Ada compiler) originally the GNU NYU (New York University) A'da(95) Translator

gnome

originally the GNU Network Object Model Environment, until that was judged not to match the project's objectives; now it doesn't stand for anything

gnuplot

a graphing tool, but one that has absolutely nothing to do with GNU: "gnu" was just an arbitrary animal name that sounds like "new"

grep

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part1/section-3.html

groff

the GNU version of troff, which is short for "typesetter roff", where "roff" is a contraction of "run-off" (as in "run off a hard copy")

guacamole

(web VNC system) arbitrary word and near-miss for a cool animal name

H

hadoop-*
Stolen from the name the programmer's son gave to a toy elephant. An arbitrary animal with convenient undertones of "lumbering but lovable".

haserl
lightweight CGI wrapper system; a German dialect word for "bunny" (so another semi-arbitrary animal)

heimdal

free implementation of Kerberos 5; named after another mythological watch-keeper (in this case a Norse god)

hesiod
a name service for storing system databases; another classical reference from Project Athena - Hesiod was biographer to the gods

hunspell
(spellchecker) originally specific to Hungarian

I

iceweasel

branding-free microfork of Mozilla Phoenix Firebird Firefox; for background see Wikipedia

icinga

a fork of NAGIOS which was careful to pick a name that's definitely untrademarked. "Icinga" means "it browses" in Zulu (where "C" represents a tutting sound).

inotify-tools

inotify is a Linux filesystem-monitoring interface, but what does the "I" stand for? It replaced dnotify, where the "D" definitely stood for "Directory"; so the answer is probably "Inode". But even Dennis Ritchie wasn't sure what the "I" in "Inode" stood for! The traditional guess was "Index", but it's only a guess.

insserv

Reading between the lines of its man page's EXIT CODES section, "install services", i.e. "add daemons to the SysV init system"

ispell

(spellchecker) nothing to do with iBooks! It was the first interactive successor to Unix spell

istanbul

(desktop recorder) disappointingly this was never known as constantinople; it was named ultra-obscurely after a particular football match.

J

java-*
the programming language is named after (a variety of) the raw material that mathematicians turn into theorems (this by the way was originally a pun in German about rather than by Erdős)

javascript-*

a programming language announced as a web technology just as Java was becoming successful in that field, and widely suspected of being named as a deliberate ploy to ride on its coat-tails, though it had been known as "Mocha" very early in its development

K

K occasionally stands for Kernel, but usually it's KDE

k3b
(KDE CD/DVD-burner) The K is obvious, but it's not "K-times-three B" (because that's a KKK-burner); it's not "K[...three letters...]B" (because that's a kebab); it's "a K and three Bs", meaning "KDE Burn, Baby, Burn".

kde

originally a replacement for the Common Desktop Environment with a Kooler arbitrary initial letter. However, these days for branding reasons the desktop environment is officially called Plasma, and KDE is just the developer community, so presumably it doesn't stand for anything.

klibc-utils
tools built with an alternate C library specialized for use at boot-time - the "K" is (probably) for Kernel

krb5-*

squeezed name for "MIT Kerberos v5"; Kerberos was the watchdog of the Greek underworld (also known in Latinized form as Cerberus), so it's a natural label for the network authentication protocol originally designed for Project Athena

krita
KOffice graphics package; in Swedish, "krita" means "chalk/crayon" and "K-rita" is "K-draw"; but if that's not enough justification, "krita" is also Sanskrit for "perfect".

L

Usually, packages with names like "libfoo" are just shared libraries pulled in by installing foo (with a few exceptions like the libreoffice* apps that depend on the library ure); as long as the end-user package is sanely named it hardly matters if it also pulls in libglibber and libnyarlathotep.

libbonobo*

deprecated CORBA precursor to dbus. Developed by Ximian and named like most of their products with an arbitrary word out of primatology

libcairo*

a graphics library originally named Xr ("X11 rendering"?), then renamed something less platform-specific: "cairo" sounds like chi-rho, which is vaguely equivalent to Xr

libexpat*
an XML parser, so called because it's an English word that's close enough to lib-X-pa(mumble)

libglib*
named after "GLib", the non-GUI-specific code separated out from GTK+, where the G as usual stands indirectly for GNU

libpango*
a cross-language hybrid: "pan" (Greek for "every") plus "go" (not quite Japanese for "language")

lsb-base

expands to "Linux Standard Base base", which is a little confusing when it's a required package even on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

lua*
Brazilian programming language inspired by the Simple Object Language (in Portuguese, "sol" is "sun" and "lua" is "moon")

lynx-cur

"Lynx" is obviously a punning animal name, but the "-cur" isn't a self-deprecatory zoological reference. Several releases ago it indicated that this was a development version, slightly more up-to-date than the separate package called plain "lynx", but unfortunately when they were reunified it was on the wrong name...

lyx

this LaTeX document processor was originally named LyriX (which apparently is just something that sounded good and vaguely resembled LaTeX) but that turned out to be taken, so it changed to something that let it keep the .lyx file extension

M

mantis

a bugtracker named after a bug-catching insect

mc
This file-manager is a clone of Norton Commander, also known as NC (yes, it's that old); its full name is "GNU Midnight Commander". Okay, that explains the "C". But what's so Midnightish about it - why wasn't it called, say, "console commander"? Either there's an obscure cultural reference here or maybe version 0.0 was called "Nocturnal Commander"

metacity
an otherwise deliberately uncool window-manager named after an arbitrary cool (made-up) word - "Metacity is not a meta-City as in an urban center, but rather Meta-ness as in the state of being meta, i.e. metacity : meta as opacity : opaque. Also it may have something to do with the Meta key on UNIX keyboards." Though surely metacity would be the state of being metacious?

mhonarc

Mail-to-HTML archiving tool, which explains most but not quite enough of it

mlocate

a locate implementation where the "M" stands for "merging"

mono-*

.NET-compatible programming platform; not named as the opposite of Stereo - it was first developed by Ximian, and "mono" is Spanish for "monkey", so it's yet another semi-arbitrary animal name

mozilla-*
originally Netscape's in-house codename/mascot for what they hoped would be a "Mosaic killer" (with perhaps a hint of self-deprecation); nowadays the "moz" part is often used as an abbreviation for Mozilla(-based browser)

mutt
a self-deprecatory animal-name close to "MUA" (and maybe "TTY"?)

mysql-*

a Structured Query Language server named after the original developer's daughter '''My'''

N

nagios

a network monitor, formerly known as NetSaint, but to avoid trademark issues uninformatively renamed as "Nagios Ain't Gonna Insist On Sainthood". Indeed it's gone rather out of its way not to infringe: "HAGIOS" would have worked equally well for that recursive acronym and would have been the New Testament Greek for "saint"...

nautilus
a file-system-navigating shell, named after a non-arbitrary animal: the shelled cephalopod whose name means "sailor".

ncurses-*

a free (and once new) fork of the curses terminal (and cursor) control library used for Text User Interfaces

nemiver

a GNOME debugger; verlan (French backslang) for "vermin"

nethack
Not a net-hacking tool or even a game played over the net. It was a game (of hacking a trail through a virtual dungeon) that was distributed and cooperatively developed over USENET

ntfs-3g

"NT file system support, third generation" - a fork, since re-merged, of ntfsprogs; but when was "-2G"? ("Windows NT" has a confused history, but is officially meaningless)

O

obnam

(backup system) short for "obligatory name", in the sense that it had to have one, and this arbitrary string will do.

ocaml

Objective Caml (originally the punning "Categorical Abstract Machine Language"; and let's not forget that "Objective" in this sense is also a play on words)

openldap

the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol provided a "telephone directory" system that was lightweight in terms of bandwidth usage compared to the X.500 DAP

openswan

as in StrongSwan and FreeS/WAN (which is punctuated a bit more transparently), "swan" indicates "Secure Wide Area Network".

orage

Originally named xfcalendar, but switched to the French for "thunderstorm", presumably as a pun on "agenda organizer" in one language or another

oregano

GNOME circuit simulator, named thematically after the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis; it can't hurt that this one has a G in it

P

passepartout

desktop publishing app. Originally "Framer" (compare FrameMaker), then renamed to something more interesting: a "passepartout" is a kind of cardboard frame that you put around watercolor paintings. (In the original French it also means "skeleton key", but that doesn't necessarily mean it installs a back door on your computer.)

perl
the expansions in the package synopses are backronyms; it started (very briefly) as Pearl, then got shortened to something more distinctive

php5

originally "Personal Home Page"; now redefined as the recursive "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor"

ping

named after the sonar pulse; "Packet InterNet Groper" is a backronym

po-debconf

There has never been a Debian Conference on the river Po. This is a tool for handling .po files (that is, gettext Portable Object message-catalogs) for debconf templates

poppler-*
(PDF renderer fork of XPDF) a Futurama reference, completely arbitrary except perhaps for the fact it begins with "P"

postfix
(MTA) apparently an arbitrary word with "post" in it

postgresql-*

a Structured Query Language server which is the successor to the Ingres project

potrace

nothing to do with .po files or pot-racing (that's dopewars); it "outlines" bitmap images as ?PostScript vector images using a polygon-based tracer

prey

a mechanism for tracking stolen computers; but is it claiming to be a predator or is it an antipredatory countermeasure? The preyproject.com logo confuses things further, since what looks at first glance like a bird of prey is in fact a scavenger

pulseaudio
(sound server) formerly Polypaudio, but renamed to something a bit cooler and more music-related with the same initials

python
is of course a Monty Python reference

python-moinmoin

the name of the MoinMoin wiki-engine is taken from a Dutch/Low Saxon greeting roughly equivalent to "aloha", presumably chosen because (like lots of wiki-engine names) it's informal and repetitive. It has nothing to do with the Nigerian steamed bean pudding of the same name.

Q

quassel
(IRC client) a German word for "blather" or "jabber"

quodlibet

(music organizer) In Latin "quod libet" is "whatever you want"; in English a quodlibet is a particular kind of musical improvization; and in Subversion as it happens the repository started with a "ql" directory (originally "query language"). See also exfalso.

R

r-base
gnu R is an implementation of S (for Stats) by two people named Ross and Robert

rarian-compat

the documentation metadata framework is called rarian because it depends on librarian0...

remmina

GNOME remote desktop client; Unclear, but one backronym that has been offered is "remote mini assistant"

remotetea

an esoteric Java ONC/RPC library. Explaining the "remote" part is easy, but the reference to tea is trickier

root-tail

it doesn't follow the superuser about; it doesn't adhere to the back side of the base mountpoint; it doesn't show the end of an inverse-power frequency distribution; it has nothing to do with rootkits or lemmatization or gardening; it just runs tail and sends its output to the desktop background (the "root window").

ruby

programming language; allegedly because it was a friend's birthstone

S

samba

the initials of the Server Message Block protocol, plus arbitrary vowels to build a word

sanduhr
German for "sand-clock".

slrn

slang-based alternative to the traditional USENET client rn ("read news")

smuxi

smart multipleXed IRC client

snort
software for heavy-duty sniffing (probably)

sox

long ago short for soundexchange

squid

(caching web proxy); an arbitrary animal

subversion

a version control system that set out to overthrow the established social order (with cvs dominant)

sudo

su-do ("perform as superuser"), with a pun on "pseudo" (after all, you're not really logged in as root)

sweep

presumably a sound wave editor something something

sylpheed

(GTK MUA) the FAQ claims it's because sylphs are lightweight, but that only explains the first syllable

sysvinit

the initialization daemon inherited from Unix System V, which replaced Unix System IV in 1983 (but the name of the alternate init mechanism "systemd" does not similarly represent "Unix System five hundred"). The package contains telinit, which apparently means "tell init" (and confusingly is a symlink to init)

T

tar

originally for creating Tape ARchives

tellico

KDE collection-tracker; just from a placename near where the developer grew up (a controversial dam in Tennessee)

texlive*
(typesetting system) the "X" in "TeX" is really a Greek "χ" (chi as in "techne" = art/skill/craft); the "live" is because it used to be possible to run upstream versions up to 2009 from a liveCD.

tgif

antique drawing tool; the name has nothing to do with GIF format (or "thank goodness it's Friday") - it stands for "Tangram Graphic Interface Facility"

tomcat

Java web server; an arbitrary animal name specifically chosen to get a tomcat onto the O'Reilly book cover

tumbler

Xfce thumbnailer, so named presumably just because it's a cut-down thumbnailer

typo3

a webCMS named after a dataloss incident

U

u-boot

there's clearly a German pun lurking beneath the surface here, but the "U" indicates "Universal" (the same as in GRUB)

udev

as with udisks, upower, uswsusp and so on the "U" here stands for "Userspace" - though the "user" in question doesn't necessarily mean the real-life entity between keyboard and chair, just a process not running in kernelspace (i.e. anything from init down to advertizing popups)

udhcpd

That's not a "u", it's a "μ" (compare udeb or usleep) - this is the Micro Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Daemon.

unixodbc-*

This is the Unix(-compatible) implementation of the Open DataBase Connectivity interface, not, say, UNIX Objective Design By Contract, or indeed United Nations International X-ray Observatory Dynamic Brake Control

unoconv

a format-switcher, but it doesn't extract things from oconv format; it's for converting between the formats used by Open/LibreOffice applications, all of which are built around the Universal Network Objects component model.

util-linux
a package with a misleadingly straightforward name. In fact it's essential/required even on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and it contains some utilities with outstandingly cryptic names:
  • cytune: for tuning Cyclades-Z multiport serial cards (as used in nineties ISPs)

  • dmesg: displays kernel ring buffer messages

  • agetty: "alternative get teletype", which is in fact the standard console login handler

  • mkfs.bfs: a tool for creating SCO UnixWare boot file systems, useful because... EXCUSE NOT FOUND

V

valac

compiler for the Vala programming language. There's no official explanation for the name, but the leading theory is that it's a Tolkien reference

valgrind

Code profiler, but not a "value-grinder" (despite the thematic names of its executables). It was originally going to be named Heimdal, but since that was taken they just switched to a different name from Norse myth. Valgrind was the magically protected gateway into Valhalla.

vidalia
a GUI for TOR (The Onion Router) named after a kind of onion (state vegetable of Georgia)

vim

"VI iMproved", just as nvi is "New" (or was in 1991) and elvis is... a word with "vi" in the middle. In all these, "VI" indicates "VIsual mode" - that is, letting you see the text you're modifying in a full-console display, which had hitherto been an optional extra

vinagre

GNOME Remote Desktop/VNC client; named after the Spanish word for vinegar, because vino was taken

vlc

VideoLAN project media-player Client

W

w3m
(the text pager that thinks it's a tabbed graphical web browser) "WWW-o miru" is Japanese for "see the World Wide Web"

whiptail

a dialog system using libnewt and named after a type of lizard (since newts are... almost lizards)

wicd

originally the Wireless Interface Connection Daemon, but since it now also handles wired networks it's officially meaningless

wireshark

this package obviously provides a filigree selachian. Either that or when ethereal got renamed they thought "what way of indicating that it bites up network packets would be coolest and least likely to be trademarked?"

wodim

(fork of cdrecord) An approximate acronym for Write Optical DIsk Media, which is intelligible but hardly the first thing you'd guess.

workrave
RSI preventer; the "work" part makes sense, but what's the "rave"? A dance party? A French turnip?

wvdial

upstream were formerly known as "Worldvisions Weaver Software", and parts of this package were known as "weaver", later abbreviated to just "wv-". Nothing to do with the package wv (where it's short for MSWordView).

X

Things that begin with X mostly fall into one of two types:

  1. the ones like xterm, xlock, or xdm where "X" indicates "for X11"

  2. the ones like xemacs, xfs, or xz, where the "X" is a random distinguishing letter (the world's least effective UUID)

x11
The eleventh major version of the X Window System (released in 1987; the minor version X11r7 came out in 2005). The X here isn't a type-2; it was originally intended to mark X as a successor to the W Window System developed for the V Operating System

xaw3dg

a library for X-consortium Athena Widget-set three-dimensional graphics support, plus a "G" for glibc2 left over from the 1997 libc6 transition

xawtv

originally an analog TV viewer based on XAW (as above)

xdg-*

some of these packages take the trouble to explain that they come from the FreeDesktop.Org standardization efforts, but not that XDG is short for its previous name, the "X Desktop Group" (a "type-1" X)

xemacs*

a fork of GNU Emacs, originally known as Lucid Emacs; when ownership of the Lucid Inc trademark became unclear it was renamed XEmacs, where the X is a "type-2"

xen-*
designed for the "Xenoserver Project", where "xeno-" means "alien" (that is, a virtualized foreign OS)

xfce-*

stood for XForms Common Environment while that was accurate, but now doesn't stand for anything

xindy

a LaTeX indexing tool; allegedly stands for "fleXible INDexing sYstem"

xiphos

a Bible-study system based on the SWORD project, and named after a variety of Ancient Greek sword.

xli

a longstanding fork of xloadimage (not derived by summing VI + X + X + XV)

xulrunner-*

a backend for things made out of the Mozilla widget-building material known to end users as chrome and to acronym fans as XUL. That's a Ghostbusters reference as well as a standard piece of Mozilla-speak for "XML UI Language" (where XML is the "eXtensible Markup Language" and a UI is a "User Interface")

Y

Things that begin with "YA" are often self-deprecatorily claiming to be "Yet Another (whatever)". yasysmand-cling would almost certainly turn out to be the "Next Generation" fork of the Command-Line Interface for a "SYStem-MANagement Daemon".

yelp
formerly gnome-help, now inexplicable. Did the word "gelp" get written in hard-to-decipher handwriting, or what?

Z

zabbix
apparently if you take the zabbix.com training course it explains the name

zapping
a lot of continental Europeans seem to think "zapping" is a cool English word for "channel-hop"

zenity
(dialog tool) mysterious; presumably the connection with Zen Buddhism is just that it tries to be simple

zfs*

(mostly FreeBSD-only) the last word in file systems, if only alphabetically; originally the Zettabyte File System

zlib1g

a compression library. This field has been associated with the letter "Z" since the seventies, partly because of the Lempel-Ziv family of algorithms and partly because of the word "zip". Oddly, zlib1g isn't the upstream or source package name (that's plain "zlib") or the name of the library it provides (that's "libz1"). The "g" is probably a hangover from the libc6 transition (which means it effectively stands for "glibc2")

zomg

(libre.fm client) well, it's implemented in zsh...

zope

(webappserver) "Z Object Publishing Environment" (where the "Z" seems to be just because it's a cool letter)

zorp
this appears to be an arbitrary nonsense-syllable, and not (as one might have guessed) the Hungarian for "zonealarm".

zsh

the Z shell, named because the developer had a colleague named Zhong Shao and thought his login "zsh" looked cool