Yes, I'm quite sure that is the actual meaning. Back in the day there was 'ereg' as well, but that has been deprecated for a long time I think. IIRC, in 1998-1999 it was a commonly asked question when to use preg_ or ereg_ functions.

But I guess the php docs themselves have caused people to think that the p stands for 'perform' - from the php docs 'preg_match - Perform a regular expression match.'. So yeah.