How about O_CREAT_DIRECTORY?

How about O_CREAT_DIRECTORY?

at the point when Thompson and Ritchie were defining unix syscall names, the choice of "creat" over "create" was not imposed by a technical limit but was rather "we like and are used to abbreviated names".

Remember that these are the folks who brought you ls, cp, and rm. If all you have to interact with your computer is an actual teletype (with a roll of paper rather than a CRT display), brevity becomes very enticing.

Also, people were presumably used to the idea of identifiers with at most six significant characters from Fortran.