I think a lot of people would hate having it be recursive by default.

If it were up to me it would be called `find` and it would have flags to find files or text within files.

All the core unix tools have the problem of predating the vowel generation (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VowelGeneration).

'grep' isn't a case of disemvowelment (there's an e!), it's just a weird mnemonic that's outlived its referent.

Recursive is not the default use for grep. stdin-stdout filtering is.

"regexsearch" is more work to type and more space taken up everytime 'grep' appears in a command-line. And says nothing about recursion.

Recursion is caused either by -R or -r on nearly all commands and is pretty standard, and r is virtually never the default on any command because that would be a bad idea. And yes, having to type regexsearch rather than grep would have been a bad idea; while grep isn't a great name it's far preferable to someone who types constantly. Search or find would have been better names, names need to be both short and descriptive on the command line, and short comes first.

Use the built-in search.

Edit: the rest of my comment (somehow submitted to soon!)

    man grep

    /recurs<enter>

or use 'grep':

    $ man grep | grep recursive
                  directory,  recursively,  following  symbolic links only if they
                  Exclude  directories  matching  the  pattern  DIR from recursive
           -r, --recursive
                  Read all files  under  each  directory,  recursively,  following
           -R, --dereference-recursive
                  Read all files under each directory,  recursively.   Follow  all