[munch117]

It doesn't have a CPU emulation layer, but that doesn't mean it's not a emulator.

The name always stood for "WINE Is Not an Emulator", I'm with you on that. Self-referential acronyms were extremely fashionable back when WINE started out.

[zaat]

Actually blueflow deleted comment referenced the following interesting link (PDF, page 3) which shows that the acronym came very shortly after the name, seems that the project was named wine very early without concrete meaning, and the self-referential acronym followed soon. As far as I can tell it was never Windows Emulator.

https://wiki.winehq.org/images/5/5c/Wineconf-2018.pdf

Before wine, there was wabi for Solaris, and wine was implementation of the same idea for Linux. wabi is indeed more correct name, since it is an ABI layer (despite Solaris claim to the contrary, the motives for might be legal reasons).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_(software)