Grammatically speaking, what is the Hurd?
{NHW} “Hurd”, as an acronym, stands for “Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”. Hird, in turn, stands for “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth”. We treat “Hurd” as a title rather than as a proper name: it requires an article, as in “the Hurd”. For instance: “The ext2 filesystem is provided by the Hurd, not by Mach.” Note that all of the following are incorrect: “Hurd”, “HURD”, “The HURD”, and “the hurd”. We write “the GNU Hurd” instead of “the Hurd” when we want to emphasize that the Hurd is a GNU package. Once this has been made clear, we usually use the shorter form, without “GNU”. The whole operating system includes not only the kernel and the system servers, but also many more programs. This system is called “GNU”, or “the GNU operating system”. The GNU programs can also run on other operating system kernels. We say “GNU/Hurd” when we want to put emphasis on the fact that this is the GNU system running on top of the Hurd, and to contrast it with the GNU/
