linux and MacOSX man su say "substitute user" (though "switch" seems to make more sense). but i'm pretty sure that in the old days it was "superuser", which is the default user to switch to.
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It's ambiguous in the original manual (page 17 of bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/man13.pdf, which is a scanned version of the original Version 1 UNIX manual), which does mention becoming 'super-user', but only once and not as the command name. I'm a bit too lazy to figure out when it changed from switching to UID 0 to being able to switch to any user, as that's likely to be the first place it's mentioned as switch or substitute.
All I've ever heard people say when talking about it is 'switch' though, probably because that's the mental flow for most people.
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linux and MacOSX
man susay "substitute user" (though "switch" seems to make more sense). but i'm pretty sure that in the old days it was "superuser", which is the default user to switch to.It's ambiguous in the original manual (page 17 of bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/man13.pdf, which is a scanned version of the original Version 1 UNIX manual), which does mention becoming 'super-user', but only once and not as the command name. I'm a bit too lazy to figure out when it changed from switching to UID 0 to being able to switch to any user, as that's likely to be the first place it's mentioned as switch or substitute.
All I've ever heard people say when talking about it is 'switch' though, probably because that's the mental flow for most people.