The history of how the word style stuck around according to Daniel Sheppard's comment.
"The definition is of 3-style is vague in my opinion, so this is more of an evolution process than a moment where someone learnt it.
People used comms in part for a long time, back to the earliest days of WCA and possibly before. However, 3OP was the dominant method for a number of years.
I believe sometime around 2008 or so the fastest blders were switching to "freestyle", which you could regard as the start of 3-style. Freestyle was pretty much what the name suggests - it could refer to a lot of different approaches from learning 378 algs to just making everything up as you go along.
From there it just evolved slowly with the alg-learners changing algs from move-optimal to speed-optimal and the instinctual solvers starting to actually learn algs.
And that brings us to where we are now with the "speed optimal algs" version of 3-style."
I get that freestyle was a trendy thing to call on the spot commutators back then, and then 3-style started to catch along. However, it holds no relevance from today's perspective and we can just call speed optimal comms as UF3 or UR3 or some other precise coinage. Especially without the word style
.
Personally I feel 3-style should be called as UF3 and floating 3-style as FFUF3.
"The definition is of 3-style is vague in my opinion, so this is more of an evolution process than a moment where someone learnt it.
People used comms in part for a long time, back to the earliest days of WCA and possibly before. However, 3OP was the dominant method for a number of years.
I believe sometime around 2008 or so the fastest blders were switching to "freestyle", which you could regard as the start of 3-style. Freestyle was pretty much what the name suggests - it could refer to a lot of different approaches from learning 378 algs to just making everything up as you go along.
From there it just evolved slowly with the alg-learners changing algs from move-optimal to speed-optimal and the instinctual solvers starting to actually learn algs.
And that brings us to where we are now with the "speed optimal algs" version of 3-style."
I get that freestyle was a trendy thing to call on the spot commutators back then, and then 3-style started to catch along. However, it holds no relevance from today's perspective and we can just call speed optimal comms as UF3 or UR3 or some other precise coinage. Especially without the word style

Personally I feel 3-style should be called as UF3 and floating 3-style as FFUF3.