nginx (“engine x”) is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server. […] [1]
I still pronounce it as “n-jinx” in my head.
References
- Title (website): “nginx”. Publisher: NGINX. Accessed: 2025-02-26T23:25Z. URI: https://nginx.org/en/.
- §“nginx”. ¶1.
And JSON is pronounced “javascripton“
Oh my god it’s Javascripton Bourne!
Occasionally i feel myself longing back to the good ol’ JSOFF times.
That is the lamest decepticon transformer I’ve ever heard of
Wtf?
It’s Jason. If they wanted it pronounced that way, they should’ve spelled it differently…
Like GIF
Sorry, no, at least one could argue GIF. JSON is a single freakin’ vowel short of a common male name.
Morons.
Jason = jay-sun
JSON = jay-sawnNo, it’s pronounced Jason. Douglas Crockford was just too laissez-faire to correct anyone on it probably because he didn’t give a fuck.
If you really just say Jason instead of jaysawn/J-sohn you’re nuts and probably drive everyone crazy with that
You & your buddies can keep pronouncing it jaysawn & sounding like complete dorks if it makes you feel better. However, it was clearly intended to be pronounced naturally as Jason like its inventor pronounces it.
Believing otherwise is almost as bad as the plebs who think the symbol ∅ is inspired by Greek letter φ instead of Scandinavian letter Ø.
Didn’t realize I was buddies with 99% of everyone that’s interacted with JSON!
Also didn’t know people used the term ‘plebs’ unironically, you sound like an absolute joy to be around
You seem in irrational need for validation of your pronunciation despite clear justification against it. Cool ad populum. Fly that insecurity flag high.
They’re joking. js doesn’t even officially stand for JavaScript due to Oracle’s IP claim over the JavaScript name.
Oracle probably makes more money from the dmca than their actual products tbh.
Oracle actually making products and services is only their side hustle
And even more annoying, JavaScript is not correctly uppercased for common styles
GIF like Geoffrey the giraffe, if you get my gist. Always has been.
I always thought the G stood for graphics, but now I know it stands for giraffics.
It doesn’t matter what it stands for. That’s not how acronyms work.
You don’t say “yolwa” for “YOLO”
You don’t say “Ah-ih-dees” for “AIDS”
You don’t say “britches” for “BRICS”
You don’t say “sue-knee” for “CUNY” (City University of New York) Etc.And if you want to argue specifically about G:
You don’t say “Jad” for “GAD” (generalized anxiety disorder)
You don’t say “joes” for “GOES” (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)It’s not a hill I’m going to die on, I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I’ve ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it “jif”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation
Now let’s talk about “gibs” you heathens.
SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.
And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.
People forget in the 90s/00s both GIF and JIF were relatively common image file types. It was only logical to use the hard G for GIF. So that’s how we used it. This overrules all arguments of how acronyms work or what the creator originally called it.
Bah, I was there. .jif was barely used and came 5 years after. They should have used a different name!
nobody was using jif as a file type in the 90s, and no it wasn’t “only logical to use the hard G”. There are plenty of sources stating that no one pronounced it with a soft g up until it got popular as an image format on social media. It was universally understood to be a play on the peanut butter name. There are plenty of sources on this, I’m sorry but you’re either just making shit up or you were the only person to call it with a hard g in the 90s.
I thought we were having a bit of a joke, but then you really went and gave me a gift of paragraphs.
I think the creator was keeping the joke running by saying that. The word gift is why people prefer to say gif over jif, it’s how we were taught to pronounce “gif”. The rest of the g words are irrelevant to be honest.
You don’t say “sue-knee” for “CUNY” (City University of New York) Etc.
Of course not, then it would conflict with SUNY (State University of New York)
JPEG = “jay-feg”
Jrafics.
JavaScript is actually pronounced with a g.
Gagascript. One is soft, one is hard.
Gangaacrupt?
GuavaScript?
I’ve been pronouncing it N-gin-X, which is probably close enough once slurred together
I always called it “in-gen-ix”, which doesn’t even make sense now that I think about it.
Unless you’re from New Zealand
Uhn-jun-uhks in NZ TYVM.
There’s a linux file called fstab which is often pronounced f-s-tab because it’s a table of file systems. It was somewhat surprising to hear Dave Plummer pronounce it as “f-stab”, as in stabbing someone…
It’ll forever be F-stab in my head
I was a non violent youth when I first saw an fstab, perhaps that got me thinking “F S tab”
Whereas fsck, short for “file system check”, should be pronounced “fisk” when someone in a suit is around, otherwise it’s “fuck”.
It’s ef sock in my head
f*ck. You can even occasionally get away with spelling it like this
f-s-tab is feeble. Unsatisfactory. Bureaucratic.
f-stab is jocose. Nonchalant. Sharp.
F-s-tab is boba
F-stab is kiki
Is that pronounced as gokoze?
“F-stab” is just more fun to say.
With the issues i had in the past with fstab, the desire to stab someone was certainly provoked.
That’s… Unfortunate.
Insert dank Winnie the Pooh meme here for F-STAB
I guess some people might go with f-s-tayb, but I wouldn’t necessary recognise what they were saying.
N-jinks is silly, f-stab is cool.
Yeah, the j-sawn pronunciation is truly inexplicable. Who pronounces S-O-N “sawn”?
I believe the Greeks do where the name originates from.
I’m hearing ya-sun-ahs. That U is halfway between uh and oo, like the U in “put”.
I’ve always pronounced it “not-Apache”
like how
curl
in my head is “curl” and not “c-url”It is pronounced like “curl” though!
We pronounce curl with an initial k sound. It rhymes with words like girl and earl. This is a short WAV file to help you:
…it’s not “curl”?
EDIT (2025-02-27T04:15Z):
cURL (pronounced like “curl”, /kɜːrl/) […] [1]
🤔
References
- Title (article): “cURL”. Publisher: Wikipedia. Published: 2025-02-20T12:12Z. Accessed: 2025-02-27T04:17Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL.
- ¶1
- Title (article): “cURL”. Publisher: Wikipedia. Published: 2025-02-20T12:12Z. Accessed: 2025-02-27T04:17Z. URI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL.
This is “jif” levels of upsetting me
I pronounce gif like zyhfe to annoy both jif and gif pronouncers equally. I also advocate for the initial array index to be .5 to be equally annoying to programmers and mathematicians alike.
I also advocate for the initial array index to be .5 to be equally annoying to programmers and mathematicians alike.
Monster!
C-url, like “sea earl”?
And GIF is pronounced GIF
PNG is pronounced “PING!”
Lo and behold,
P[i]NG
Pi
The fuck?!
P- iNG
CMYK is pronounced smück.
Schmuck.
careful there buddy
They can pry my /ɡɪf/ from my cold dead hands.
/dʒɪf/ heretics can burn
No no, we won’t be having any of that. It’s not GIF it’s GIF!
And I will always pronounce SQL as “squeal”
My brain first interpreted SQL as ‘squirrel’ and that now refuses to relinquish its claim as default pronunciation in my mind.
I still say it this way in my head…
genius
I say PSQL as Pee Sequel
I say FAQ as fuck you.
Some people pronounce it like “fack”, and the official way to pronounce GameFAQs is “game facks”
Yes, I have hear this much
That’s great actually!
When I first heard someone say SCSI out loud describing the drives in a server, I responded with, “No, they’re actually high-end drives.”
deleted by creator
I’ve never heard it pronounced any other way than “engine x”.
I’ve never heard it pronounced. Which is why I also thought it was “n-jinx”
When I first encountered it, it was by hearing it. It took longer than it probably should have to recognize that when people talked about “engine x”, they meant “in-jinks”
I heard it spoken first as well, but I ended up seeing it in text form not long after. I think it would have been more confusing if that hadn’t been the era of internet companies thinking they were clever if they dropped a letter (usually a vowel).
nyuh-inks
I started using it around 2006, and even back then it listed the pronunciation on the site.
And postgresql is pronounced post-gres-Q-L, even though it probably should be post-gre-SQL
I just pronounce it postgres. That’s the original name of the database. It originally had its own query language (quel), and SQL was later retrofitted onto it and called PostgreSQL. But the original quel language is long gone that we may as well go back to calling it just Postgres.
I just say “post grezz sequel”. Sorry if it pisses people off, but it’s a stupid name, so I’m gonna say it the way I want.
postgres2electricboogaloo
PSA: it’s acshully pronounced “Postgre-squirrel”.
Postgre-squirtle
What’s the difference? Those read the same to me. Do you mean that you want a strong gap between “gre” and the S in S-Q-L?
The first one is post-grez-queue-el, the second one is post-gree-es-queue-el
The first is the only way that makes sense, the second too easily becomes post-grease-queue-el. Which is horrible.
I will be calling it post-grease from now on.
A colleague pronounces it “Postgré”
I went for n-ginx too. I’ve known for a while that it’s actually n-gin-x but have to think carefully to not revert back.
“Engine-X” just sounds dumber. N-ginx for life
btrfs -> butterface
Thank you, i will call it that from now on
I can’t read no, I can’t read my butterface~
As always, first impressions count. There is no way I’m starting to call it engine x now, except for fun.
I’ve done a semi-exception in the case of Xitter. I like this new name Elon chose because it brings the possiblity of playful sounds. Same goes to Xitler.
In Chinese, “X” makes a “sh” sound.
Take from that what you will.
Idiot. Using English letters to try to represent sounds they don’t normally make. It didn’t work for gif (pronounced commonly as gif instead of jif), why would they think it would work for them?
first rule of english pronunciation: there are no rules. All that matters is if people understand what you mean when you say it.
I gave up on this discussion when you have to consider gin, generate, giraffe, gene, gym, etc
Also I pronounce it with the soft sound because that’s what it sounds like in the bloody alphabet.
See also ghoti (fish). English orthography only works by agreement, not rules
See also ghoti (fish).
I’ll be the first to say that English is a mess. However, there are rules, and this word breaks them.
That “gh” never appears at the beginning of a word, always at the end (as in “enough”). That “ti” is never at the end of a word; it’s always inside (as in “nation”).
Ah, a VSauce Fan
Yes, but a fan of so much that I may have heard of that before Vsauce covered it. Vsauce is much good though, all of them have some credit
According to Wikipedia, that spelling goes back to 1855. I first heard about it in the '90s.
Also I pronounce it with the soft sound because that’s what it sounds like in the bloody alphabet.
How do you pronounce the words “Cat celebration?” Is it “Kat kelebration” or “sat selebration?” I’m guessing the latter since that’s how C is pronounced in the bloody alphabet?
Just say gif like gnome
Nifty
guh-nif?
There actually are rules. They’re just complicated because English prefers to preserve the pronunciation of loan words without changing their spelling and English has a ton of loan words. If you ignore them, native English words are fairly consistent.
No, it’s pronounced GIF
Also, the correct pronunciation for that Atlassian tool is “Gira”.
“G” does normally make a “J” sound, though. Giraffe, the second G in garage and garbage, engine, gin, and so on.