carvakah). Hemacandra refers to his own grammatical work, Unadisutra 37, which runs as follows: mavaka-syamaka-vartaka-jyontaka-guvaka-bhadrakadayah. Each of these words ends with the aka suffix and is formed irregularly." This may also allude to the philosophy's hedonistic precepts of "eat, drink, and be merry".

Others believe it to mean "agreeable speech" or pejoratively, "sweet-tongued", from Sanskrit's "agreeable" and "speech" (which becomes in the nominative singular and in compounds). Yet another hypothesis is that it is eponymous,