by jmbwell on 3/21/25, 8:45 PM
I said “Freznul” for Fresnel in front of a lighting designer. He said “ah! So you’ve been reading!”
I remember that now when someone pronounces something as it’s spelled. They’ve likely been studying by actually reading something, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
by ACS_Solver on 3/21/25, 8:54 PM
The article mentions GNU, and it took me a long time until I found out that English speakers pronounce it "noo", "new" or similar. My native language routinely has four consonants in a row, sometimes more, and gn is a perfectly common consonant sequence so it never occurred to me that the GNU project could be pronounced as anything but gnu. Turns out English speakers intuitively drop the initial g, or often have to insert a pretty obvious vowel guh-noo style.
by megadata on 3/21/25, 8:40 PM
> Linus (Torvalds)
technically "LEE-nuhs" in those European languages while "LYE-nihs" in English, but he actually doesn't care what you say
It's hard not to forgive people to pronounce your name wrong, when they've never met you or anyone that pronounces it correctly. They've only read it on the screen and they still say your name as best they can.
by Brian_K_White on 3/21/25, 8:48 PM
For the longest time I would pronounce $FOO as "string foo" in my head and occasionally out loud, because that's how my dad said it when talking about BASIC code in the 70s & 80s.
Then I heard a younger co-worker do it while we were talking about sh code and felt bad for unintentionally infecting him with a nonsense habit.
by normie3000 on 3/21/25, 8:45 PM
I worked with a guy who pronounced vi as "six".
by gibbitz on 3/21/25, 8:31 PM
> GIF
like "gif", of course
I also loved they pointed out pronouncing `regex` as "rejects" was wrong.
by RheingoldRiver on 3/21/25, 8:33 PM
LaTeX is....controversial. I say "LAH-tek" but I've heard a lot of different pronunciations. LaTeX was the original gif fight haha
by NikkiA on 3/21/25, 10:07 PM
I've always pronounced 'pypi' as pie-pie and assumed it's a homonym pun.
by havan_agrawal on 3/21/25, 8:40 PM
I had a lot of trouble with "tuple": is it "too-pul", "tyu-pul" (like pupil) or "tupple" (like supple). I've heard it pronounced all ways by now
by hagbarth on 3/21/25, 8:48 PM
The Primeagen has permanently ruined my pronunciation of SQL (squeal).
by riffraff on 3/21/25, 8:38 PM
For a very long time I thought "cache" was pronounced with a voiced e, "cach-ay", probably cause I thought of "cachet".
by Remnant44 on 3/21/25, 10:26 PM
Another one I learned recently: The godot engine is not go-dot, it's guh-dow.
by wonnage on 3/21/25, 8:33 PM
Regex should be "reg-ex" rather than any of the listed pronunciations since it's just short for regular expression
by SAI_Peregrinus on 3/21/25, 9:19 PM
SQL should be pronounced like sqwrl, the small rodent with a fluffy tail.
Javascript should obviously be pronounced Yavascript.
by adzm on 3/21/25, 9:01 PM
I pronounced iterator and iterate with an EYE sound instead of an it sound. Still find myself doing that in speech or in my head. Personally it started because of the i variable commonly used in for loops; as a kid you don't hear iteration spoken often.
by elaus on 3/21/25, 9:05 PM
I feel like hardly anyone in Germany knows how to pronounce Azure (myself included for the longest time). There are no other common words like it, and what feels like the most obvious pronunciation is far from the correct one.
by Kilenaitor on 3/21/25, 8:34 PM
I used to mispronounce Redis too and I fully fault the "MongoDB is web scale"[0] video for that.
Glad I'm not alone heh
[0]: https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs
by acheron on 3/21/25, 8:42 PM
I have never heard anyone say "regex" with an /eɪ/ sound like "RAY". It's /ɛ/ like in "meh", or indeed the first syllable in "regular". (though "regex" has a "soft g" /dʒ/, not a "hard g" /g/ like in "regular").
by thehours on 3/21/25, 8:53 PM
The 'correct' way to pronounce NumPy is 'num-pie', but my brain delights in reading it as 'lumpy' with a leading 'n'.
by rvogler on 3/21/25, 8:49 PM
Kernel is actually pronounced Colonel btw.
by ofrzeta on 3/21/25, 11:22 PM
Arguably it's missing "Engine X" (NGinx), "Skasee" (SCSI) and "Pixie" (PXE).
by nlitsme on 3/21/25, 8:54 PM
It seems Americans always screw up German names, like Gödel, Schrödinger.
So are Dutch names like Dijkstra, Huygens.
I don't think there are sounds like 'ö', 'ij', or 'ui' in English.
note: 'uy' is the 16th century spelling of current 'ui'.
by foxglacier on 3/21/25, 8:35 PM
Took me years to realize Linux wasn't lie-nix. Some of my friends had been calling it that and it seems we were a bubble of wrong. There's also the lee-noox camp but that's just weird.
Also sea hash turned out to be sea sharp.
by colordrops on 3/21/25, 8:47 PM
Back in the BBS days I used to pronounce "warez" like "juarez", growing up in a spanish speaking community, and not knowing it was short for "softwares".
by Aldipower on 3/22/25, 12:30 AM
And flagged. This thread is so interesting and shows how much european language diversification is involved in tech. Not sure why some people cannot stand multi culti.:-)
by zamadatix on 3/21/25, 8:49 PM
I love it, pypi was a surprising one for me! A "Forvo for tech terms" would be nifty (many of these overlap with non-tech terms with different pronunciation).
by berbec on 3/21/25, 9:37 PM
I still haven't managed to break myself of the habit, from the 80s, of referring the operator of a BBS as if they were someone's female sibling: sis-op.
by brador on 3/21/25, 8:40 PM
The worst I heard was calling PHP “pup”. Yes that’s a u.
by adzm on 3/21/25, 9:03 PM
Also PNG is pronounced ping but I've never heard anyone say anything other than spelling out the acronym
by patrick41638265 on 3/21/25, 8:47 PM
"Ecks-eff-see-ee" (Xfce), not "x-face" (sadly, got this myth debunked just now lol)
by arevno on 3/21/25, 9:17 PM
I said "etcetera" for the unix /etc path for years before someone corrected me.
by johnisgood on 3/21/25, 8:48 PM
This is why I prefer writing over speaking when discussing programming-related stuff.
by kylehotchkiss on 3/21/25, 8:45 PM
No Whois. I said that wrong for a long time. It's WhoIs. Two words.
by nozzlegear on 3/21/25, 8:58 PM
> Poisson (distribution)
> "pwah-SOHN", with a nasally ending, because French
Je refuse.
by bn-l on 3/21/25, 9:50 PM
> repo: "REE-poh", not "REH-poh"
This is just aus vs us English.
by asmeurer on 3/21/25, 8:45 PM
Are there people actually out there saying "S-Q-L-ite"?
by thunderbong on 3/22/25, 3:11 PM
Why is this flagged?
by humblepie on 3/21/25, 8:32 PM
I don't know, but it will always be "vyte".
by nsxwolf on 3/21/25, 8:54 PM
Yesterday I found out JWT is pronounced "jot"
by Titan2189 on 3/21/25, 8:36 PM
JEE-rah, not GY-rah
by delichon on 3/21/25, 8:38 PM
Idempotent anyone? Eye-dempotent or id-empotent?
by kelafoja on 3/21/25, 8:57 PM
Missing squeel (sql) and chason (json).
by spogbiper on 3/21/25, 8:43 PM
how do you say "SIEM" or its less popular but apparently equivalent form, "SEIM"?
by avg_dev on 3/21/25, 8:42 PM
love it
especially the sense of humor... like on gif
by NegativeLatency on 3/21/25, 8:41 PM
nginx trips people up sometimes
by twolf910616 on 3/21/25, 8:38 PM
azure is tough for me.
by Imustaskforhelp on 3/23/25, 1:00 PM
Huh why was this flagged???
Shouldn't hackernews take some accountability as to why they flagged it or what
HUH??
by normie3000 on 3/21/25, 8:44 PM
ng'inx
by howard941 on 3/21/25, 8:30 PM
"Euler" instead of "Oiler"