Indeed :-)

Here is how to think about this:

* .NET Standard is a specification of APIs.

* ECMA 335 is the specification of the .NET runtime aspects (i.e. what the metadata format is, what the semantics are of the intermediate language and so on).

* ECMA 334 is the C# language specification.

So there are really multiple specs that would make up a ".NET spec". We simply settled on .NET Standard because it's shorter than .NET Standard Library and the word standard conveys the spec aspect around it. We could have called it .NET Standard API Set but hey, it's supposed to be a product name, not a multi-word description :-)

Does this help?