Fisher score

Marius Aasan has kindly provided a link, describing the origin of the expression.  http://jeff560.tripod.com/s.html  

It reads:

The "score" was originally associated with a particular genetic application; a family is assigned a score based on the number of children of each category and there were different ways scoring associated with different ways of estimating linkage.  In a 1935 paper ("The Detection of Linkage with Dominant Abnormalities," Annals of Eugenics, 6, 193) Fisher wrote that, because of the efficiency of maximum likelihood, the "ideal score" is provided by the derivative of the log-likelihood function.