Initially, “GNOME” was an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment, referring to the original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft’s OLE it was dropped, because this no longer reflects the core vision of the GNOME project

This is the story of GNOME name according to Wikipedia. I guess not many people knew this. Digging some more on Mailing Lists I came into a discussion about what should be the name of GNOME. I didn’t come up with a clear answer but most people agreed that GNOME should be named to Gnome as it wasn’t stand for an acronym anymore.

That discussion took place just before the GNOME 3 release so some developers proposed a complete new name for the complete new interface. As we all know that didn’t happen. Truth is that GNOME as brand name isn’t recognized at all, and is mostly hidden behind Distros. Nowadays Gnome-Shell impact in GNOME is so enormous that people mention Shell meaning the whole GNOME.

Anyway, last post on this mailing list was “you can call it whatever you want GNOME or Gnome”, so from now on at least here we’re gonna call it just Gnome!