What is the word inode mean in *nix ?

speculated to be short for “index nodes

introduced 1970’s short for index nodes.

They were adopted into Linux in the 90s—and for good reason.

They’re an excellent way to keep track of how your files are stored, and the method many systems are still based on today.

An inode is a file data structure that stores information about any Linux file except its name and data.