Perl in the Oxford Dictionary
"'Perl' is one of the words newly added to the Oxford Dictionary of English: Perl. noun [mass noun]. Computing. a high-level programming language used especially for applications running on the World Wide Web. ORIGIN 1980s: respelling of PEARL, arbitrarily chosen for its positive connotations." "
Actually, I think they got the word origin wrong. The Perl books I have say it comes from and acronym, (P)ractical (E)xtraction and (R)eporting (L)anguage.