Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
While I agree with your quoted line, the tag as written, "Preferences", would be my first choice concerning the OSX Preference Panes. A quick search and cursory browsing of the questions tagged with "Preferences" seems to concur. It that sense, I could certainly see the similarity with settings, but in this particular regard, I might suggest that closer match would be "control-panel"
@Tom FWIW, of the answers that I post that are essentially links (though I do try to pull the most pertinent info into the answer), 99% of them come from the first couple google results. When that's the case, I have to think that the OP didn't actually google it themselves.
