The original author first was going to call it winemu, but didn't like that. He shortened it to "wine", which led him to think of "whine" and "whinny". He liked "whine" but thought that was too long so "wine" it was.

The first suggestion of "Wine is Not an Emulator" was in 1993, when there were concerns Microsoft might raise trademark objects to "Windows Emulator". No one took that name suggestion seriously.

It wasn't until 1997 that it was adapted, as an alternative. In late 1997, the Wine FAQ said

> The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best.

The shift to not mentioning it being a Windows emulator happened later. The release notes for 981108 said

> This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator.

and for 981211 said

> This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

As far as I've been able to glean from old Usenet posts, there were two reasons they stopped mentioning it being an emulator.

1. It could be used for more than just running Windows binaries under Unix. If you had source to a Windows program you could compile it on Unix and link it with Wine to give you a port of the Windows program. Wine was now a Windows compatibility system that included more than just an emulator. It was an emulator and a porting library.

2. Computers were getting fast enough that people were starting to run hardware emulators to do things like run game binaries from old consoles or old personal computers. Such emulators were not very fast. This might lead users to think that emulation was inherently slow, which might turn them off from trying Wine under the mistaken impression that it too would be slow.

Wine, when used to run Windows binaries rather than as a library when porting, is in fact still an emulator just like it was when Bob Amstadt first wrote it. Nothing technical changed when they added the backronym, or changed the text for the 981211 release notes.

But now we have plenty of people who have only ever seen the backronym, and the only emulators they have used that call themselves emulators have been emulating hardware, and so will insist that for something to be an emulator is must be emulating hardware.