Tech terms I was pronouncing wrong

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I worked with a guy who pronounced vi as "six".

> GIF like "gif", of course

I also loved they pointed out pronouncing `regex` as "rejects" was wrong.

LaTeX is....controversial. I say "LAH-tek" but I've heard a lot of different pronunciations. LaTeX was the original gif fight haha

I've always pronounced 'pypi' as pie-pie and assumed it's a homonym pun.

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

The Primeagen has permanently ruined my pronunciation of SQL (squeal).

For a very long time I thought "cache" was pronounced with a voiced e, "cach-ay", probably cause I thought of "cachet".

Another one I learned recently: The godot engine is not go-dot, it's guh-dow.

Regex should be "reg-ex" rather than any of the listed pronunciations since it's just short for regular expression

SQL should be pronounced like sqwrl, the small rodent with a fluffy tail.

Javascript should obviously be pronounced Yavascript.

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.

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.

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

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").

The 'correct' way to pronounce NumPy is 'num-pie', but my brain delights in reading it as 'lumpy' with a leading 'n'.

Kernel is actually pronounced Colonel btw.

Arguably it's missing "Engine X" (NGinx), "Skasee" (SCSI) and "Pixie" (PXE).

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'.

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.

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".

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.:-)

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).

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.

The worst I heard was calling PHP “pup”. Yes that’s a u.

Also PNG is pronounced ping but I've never heard anyone say anything other than spelling out the acronym

"Ecks-eff-see-ee" (Xfce), not "x-face" (sadly, got this myth debunked just now lol)

I said "etcetera" for the unix /etc path for years before someone corrected me.

This is why I prefer writing over speaking when discussing programming-related stuff.

No Whois. I said that wrong for a long time. It's WhoIs. Two words.

> Poisson (distribution)

> "pwah-SOHN", with a nasally ending, because French

Je refuse.

> repo: "REE-poh", not "REH-poh"

This is just aus vs us English.

Are there people actually out there saying "S-Q-L-ite"?

Why is this flagged?

I don't know, but it will always be "vyte".

Yesterday I found out JWT is pronounced "jot"

JEE-rah, not GY-rah