Source: svn://svnanon.samba.org/samba/tags/release-2-2-12/docs/history

It’s now October 1998. We just got back from the 3rd CIFS conference
in SanJose. The Samba Team was the biggest contingent there.

Samba 2.0 should be shipping in the next few weeks with much better
domain controller support, GUI configuration, a new user space SMB
filesystem and lots of other neat stuff. I’ve also noticed that a
search of job ads in DejaNews turned up 3900 that mention Samba. Looks
like we’ve created a small industry.

I’ve been asked again where the name Samba came from. I might as well
put it down here for everyone to read. The code in Samba was first
called just “server”, it then got renamed “smbserver” when I
discovered that the protocol is called SMB. Then in April 1994 I got
an email from Syntax, the makers of “TotalNet advanced Server”, a
commercial SMB server. They told me that they had a trademark on the
name SMBserver and I would have to change the name. I ran an egrep for
words containing S, M, and B on /usr/dict/words and the name Samba
looked like the best choice. Strangely enough when I repeat that now I
notice that Samba isn’t in /usr/dict/words on my system anymore!

As he did not mention the command he ran to get this word out of the built-in dictionary, I tried some regex and got this one which is most likely the command:

egrep -i “^s[a-z]{0,1}m[a-z]{0,1}b[a-z]{0,1}$” /usr/share/dict/words

On CentOS:

samba
Sambo
sambo
Simaba
simba
SMB
Sumba

On Mac OS X 10.6.1

samba
Sambo
sambo
Simaba

( /usr/share/dict/words, because I ran this on CentOS, Mac )