Why is dmesg called dmesg?
I think it stands for "diagnostic messages", as per the older1 man page (referenced here too).
dmesg - system diagnostic messages
Dmesg looks in a system buffer for recent kernel diagnostic messages and reproduces them on the standard output
One of the oldest references appears to be a man page revision by Kirk McKusick dating back from 1985.
1: the link doesn't always work - no idea why... I'm attaching a screenshot though you should still be able to access the page via Google's cache.
I think the dmesg
command just stands for display messages. The FreeBSD manpages seem to share this view:
dmesg -- display the system message buffer