UNIX Directories stand for something:

https://serverfault.com/questions/137605/what-do-these-abbreviations-stand-for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/dirstructure.html
https://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/tip/Excavating-ancient-abbreviations-in-Linux

backronyms
an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or
words, either to create a memorable name or as a fanciful explanation of a word's origin.
"Biodiversity Serving Our Nation, or BISON (a backronym if ever there was one)"

Directory meanings: Check the output from "man hier"

/usr actually means Unix System Resources. https://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-

Hierarchy/html/usr.html

 /usr originally meant “user”. “Unix System Resources” is a backronym and it doesn’t make much sense
either, because the system resources are in /bin and /sbin; /usr can be mounted much later from within a
running unix system. Canonical source: bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/bellLabs/unix/… (p.13-14 in
the PDF) from Bell Labs in ’72. – moeffju Apr 9 '14 at 12:29

 I remember single-stepping though UNIX v7 code to learn the meaning of interrupts. And, yes - my first
home directory was /usr/michael - and /usr/local was "born" to allow users to add stuff in a "local" root. My
guess that /usr became "UNIX Software Repository" is because /usr/src is where you (re-)built UNIX
whenever you added a device (or fixed a bug). My other favorite file was /usr/sys/conf.h - as that is the file
I remember as being the conf file of conf files (e.g., where disk partitions were defined). Ah - the
memories 

/etc stands for et cetera. Wikipedia references a Bell Labs document from '72 that calls it
etcetera.
"The "etc" in "/etc/bin" really does stand for "etcetera." In early Unix systems, the most important
directory was the "bin" directory (short for "binaries" -- compiled programs), and "etc" was for trivial
stuff like startup, shutdown and admin. The list of things you need for running Linux is: a program
binary, etcetera, etcetera -- in other words, a sole vital item, plus some less important bits and pieces.

Today, "etc" holds system-wide configuration files that you'd almost never do without -- hardly
unimportant." --

For the curious reader, sbin is short for “system binaries” (although it’s sometimes been described as
being short for “static binaries”, because on some systems the executables in /sbin would always be
statically-linked to ensure a bootable system if /lib was destroyed); lib, fairly obviously, stands for
“libraries”.
/var contains “variable files” — things like logs, process IDs, temporary directories, mail spools.
/proc (on systems which have a proc filesystem) originally just contained information about running
processes, but Linux extended this to include lots of other information, too (for example, cat
/proc/cpuinfo).
On some older Unix variants, /etc often contained executable programs (and actually may still do, in
some cases), rather than simply being restricted to configuration files. If memory serves, ifconfig was
actually /etc/ifconfig on SVR4 systems some years ago.
If you use a Solaris machine, you’ll also see xpg4 (standing for “X/Open Portability Guide”), ccs (“C
Compiler System”), and ucb (“University of California, Berkeley” — BSD compatibity).
You may find reading up on the “Filesystem Hierarchy Standard” (FHS) helpful :)