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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> The oddly named wc is a command used to count things.

It’s named after word count.

I wonder if the author might have thought it was an odd name because "wc" is also used in some English-speaking countries as an abbreviation for "water closet", a synonym for a flush toilet.

Still oddly named. Why isn't it called count or cnt?

To keep with the Unix tradition of short command names, I guess?

`wc` was in 1st edition Unix. It was setting the tradition, not keeping with it!

I suspect the ability to count things other than words was added later.

wc shares an environment with grep, awk, sed and vi; wc is NOT oddly named.

also with at, bc, cd, cp, dd, df, du and so on

I'm not sure about that - I think you could argue that they're all oddly named.

That's exactly the point of parent comment.

I thought I heard something flying overhead.

For those interested in the etymology of these:

grep is from the ed command (which itself is short for editor, the original Unix text editor) g/re/p, which Globally searches for a Regular Expression and Prints it.

sed is Stream EDitor.

vi is VIsual editor, which is so named because it's like ed but shows you what you're editing.

Not sure where the name awk comes from.

All of these tools are closely related to the venerable ed(1) command.

Awk is named after its authors at Bell Labs: Aho, Williams, and Kernighan.

Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.

You are so right, thank you!

also - not pointing any fingers - I suspect for the same reason hexadecimal (which programmers shortened to hex) was used over the proper Latin sexadecimal.

Hm, I never realized that hexadecimal mixes the Greek prefix (hexa-) with Latin suffix (-decimal).

However, wouldn't proper Latin be sedecimal?

If I wrote things in sex I’d probably get fired.

And overlap with a common abbreviation that refers to a toilet, WC (water closet)[1]

So yes, it has an odd name, and I'm sure the inventor of the wc command thought it funny.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet

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