What does MINGW stand for? 

MinGW

MinGW ("Minimalist GNU for Windows"), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. MinGW includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows (assembler, linker, archive manager), a set of freely distributable Windows specific header files and static import libraries which enable the use of the Windows API, a Windows native build of the GNU Project's GNU Debugger, and miscellaneous utilities. MinGW does not rely on third-party C runtime dynamic-link library (DLL) files, and because the runtime libraries are not distributed using the GNU General Public License (GPL), it is not necessary to distribute the source code with the programs produced, unless a GPL library is used elsewhere in the program.MinGW can be run either on the native Microsoft Windows platform, cross-hosted on Linux (or other Unix), or "cross-native" on Cygwin. Although programs produced under MinGW are 32-bit executables, they can be used both in 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows. The development of the MinGW project has been forked with the creation in 2005–2008 of an alternative project called Mingw-w64.

see more »