terminology - What is the origin of the term "heap" for the free store?

Question

I am trying to find the official (or a good enough) reason that the free store is commonly referred to as the heap.

Except for the fact that it grows from the end of the data segment, I can't really think of a good reason, especially since it has very little to do with the heap data structure.

Note: Quite a few people mentioned that it's just a whole bunch of things that are kind of unorganized. But to me the term heap physically means a bunch of things that are physically dependent on one another. You pull one out from underneath, everything else collapses on it, etc. In other words, to me heap sounds loosely organized (e.g., latest things are on top). This is not exactly how a heap actually works on most computers, though if you put stuff towards the beginning of the heap and then grew it I guess it could work.

Answer 1

Knuth rejects the term "heap" used as a synonym for the free memory store.

Several authors began about 1975 to call the pool of available memory a "heap." But in the present series of books, we will use that word only in its more traditional sense related to priority queues. (Fundamental Algorithms, 3rd ed., p. 435)