What word is abbreviated by "N" in names of destructive Lisp functions?
Here is a direct answer from Linearity's link:
The N stands for non-consing, meaning it doesn't need to allocate any new cons cells.
Instead of allocating new cells, the old cells are reused resulting in destructive/impure modifications.
Signalling destructive behavior is critical, but it's also nice to know that the non-consing variants are typically faster as they don't copy objects and leave garbage lying around.
The specific section containing this information is titled: "Destructive" Operations
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