The story
Blend of Charlie + multiplexing. It was proposed in early 1995 by Charlie Allen at Maxim Integrated.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Charlieplexing
Today it means: A technique for driving a multiplexed display in which relatively few I/O pins on a microcontroller are used to drive an array of LEDs. It is based on tristate logic. Full definition →