If you want to literally know what it stands for, the answer is ARGument Vector. In programming, vector is generally a synonim for array (especially for BASIC, FORTRAN and C folks).

The identifier name descends from C, with some differences:

• it's usually lowercase in C;
• it's called argv in C just by convention, it could be any other name;
• it's a local (lexical, auto) variable in C, it belongs to the Main package in Perl;
• the first element, in the C incarnation, is the program name; Perl stores this value in $0;
• C needs another parameter, argc, to know how many values are stored in argv; in Perl you can evaluate an array in scalar context to see how many values it contains, or you can use $#array to get the last valid index of teh array itself.

-- TMTOWTDI