The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
least recently used
(operating systems) (LRU) A rule used in a paging system
which selects a page to be paged out if it has been used
(read or written) less recently than any other page. The same
rule may also be used in a cache to select which cache entry
to flush.
This rule is based on temporal locality - the observation
that, in general, the page (or cache entry) which has not been
accessed for longest is least likely to be accessed in the
near future.
(1995-02-15)