What is the origin of the name uv?

[johnthagen]

When I introduce uv to my colleagues, a surprising number of them ask me "what does uv stand for?" or "where did that name come from?".

Some come up with their own interpretations such as "ultraviolet light = fast", etc.

Is there anything documented about the origin of the name "uv", if only so I can point the extra curious folks at? Was it simply chosen as a short CLI name that didn't conflict with other Linux utilities? Is there a deeper meaning known only to Charlie? 😄

[alphavector]

We considered a ton of names — it's really hard to pick a name without collisions this day so every name was a balance of tradeoffs.

uv was given to us on PyPI, is Astral-themed (i.e. ultraviolet or universal), and is short and easy to type.

🤷‍♀️

#1349 (comment)

[charliermarsh]

Yeah for me it's short for "ultraviolet" though we liked that there were a few different possible interpretations. We wanted something that was (1) available on PyPI and elsewhere, (2) had minimal conflicts with other software projects, and (3) was easy to type!