Tried to search the web and couldn’t find an answer. It might have something to do with “load”, but that doesn’t make much sense to me.
Obviously, “ln” was already taken, but where does that “d” come from?
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Linkers in Linux were originally called loaders. See Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with Linux by Jeff Duntemann:
Linking the Object code File
…Linux comes with its own linker, called ld. (The name is actually short for “load”, and “loader” was what linkers were originally called, in the First Age of Unix, back in the 1970s.)
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Because it is “link editor”. For example, Solaris and AIX man pages explicitly say so:
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Solaris
ldman pageld – link-editor for object files
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AIX
ldman pageThe ld command, also called the linkage editor or binder
In the comment to the question there is an extremely interesting link to 1971 UNIX man pages. There is a ld man page, which explicitly states ld – link editor, see the man12.pdf file (page 20):
NAME ld — link editor
Wikipedia mentions that there are different theories, one is “loader” one is “link editor”.
Sidenote – amazing, regular expressions already existed in 1971…
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