What is "Linting"?
Lint was the name of a program that would go through your C code and identify problems before you compiled, linked, and ran it. It was a static checker, much like FindBugs today for Java.
Like Google, "lint" became a verb that meant static checking your source code.
Linting is the process of running a program that will analyse code for potential errors.
See lint on wikipedia:
lint was the name originally given to a particular program that flagged some suspicious and non-portable constructs (likely to be bugs) in C language source code. The term is now applied generically to tools that flag suspicious usage in software written in any computer language.