Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment reminded me of the classic Ken Thompson quote: >Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e." There was definitely a mentality at this time that symbols should be short. Probably partly because of the low resolution terminals of the time, and especially teletypes but also maybe because of different practices and a…
I believe its more that the original only had 5 char max ids. So we get fcntl and ioctl -- two different shortenings of `control` !
And then many Unix shell utilities are themselves counterparts of the corresponding C APIs - e.g. "chown". It stands to reason that they'd have identical names; but in doing so, they would also set a precedent for that kind of shortening in general. So if you already have "chown", then why not "chgrp"? And if you have "chgrp", then you'd probably want "newgrp" rather than "newgroup".