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[[meta title="Grammatically speaking, what is the Hurd?"]]
*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/Linux system which is GNU using Linux as the kernel.
Finally, there is *Debian GNU/Hurd*. This refers to the distribution of the GNU
system as created by the Debian developers. For example: *What do you run on
your laptop? Debian GNU/Hurd, of course.*
The French generally write *le Hurd*--that is, they treat the name as masculine
singular, capitalized as in English.
When we are referring to the microkernel, we say *Mach* and use it as a proper
noun. For example: *Mach uses the device drivers found in version 2.0.x of
Linux.* We sometimes say *the Mach microkernel* instead of just *Mach*.
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