Tried to search the web and couldn't find an answer. It might have something to do with "load", but that doesn't make much sense to me.

Obviously, "ln" was already taken, but where does that "d" come from?

Linkers in Linux were originally called loaders. See Assembly Language Step-by-Step: Programming with Linux by Jeff Duntemann:


  Linking the Object code File
  
  ...Linux comes with its own linker, called ld. (The name is actually short for "load", and "loader" was what linkers were originally called, in the First Age of Unix, back in the 1970s.)

