[R] What does LOESS stand for?

[Peter Neuhaus]

Dear R-community,

maybe someone can help me with this:

I've been using the loess() smoother for quite a while now, and for
the matter of documentation I'd like to resolve the acronym LOESS.
Unfortunately there's no explanation in the help file, and I didn't
get anything convincing from google either.

I know that the predecessor LOWESS stands for "Locally Weighted
Scatterplot Smoothing". But what does LOESS stand for, specifically?
"Locally Weighted Exponential Scatterplot Smoothing"? As far as
I understand LOESS is still a local polynomial regression, so that
would probably make no sense.

Any help appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Peter