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Comment by jxcl | Hacker News Reader

I have never heard someone pronounce nginx "n-jinks" before like they did in their video. It's a minor thing, but it hurts their credibility in my eyes.

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Doh! Good catch! I thought we figured it out!

Sorry for that. We're not native speakers. The thing is that "n-jinks" is how Russian NGINX team pronounce it. X is pronounced as iks, not ex, in Russian.

I mean, I know it's pronounced like engine-ex (just like it's Oh-Ess Ten, not Oh-Ess-Ex, or jif not gif), but when I'm just reading the word to myself it comes out n-jinks because fewer syllables.

> jif not gif

2/10 troll, try harder.

To be fair, this is due to the horrible branding on NginX's part. Nearly every non-technical person I know has pronounced it njinks, because using 'n' phonetically as 'en' is not exactly commonplace.

Watching our PM get to their name in a story and pause for a few seconds and just say "that word" instead should give you some idea of how counter-intuitive it is.

You don't have to work hard to parse good branding.

And it's totally understandable in day-to-day conversation if somebody gets it wrong. But if you're making a marketing video, maybe check that you're pronouncing the words correctly?

I have heard this many times, mostly from non-native English people. I don't see any problem with that. Also we tend to say 'oh-ess-eks'. :D

You mean for OS X? What other way is there to pronounce it?

"Oh, s-10?"

Even when I worked for AppleCare many of us still said it that way. Apple had very strict guidelines and we could get in trouble if we said it in any way but "OS 10" but it's a very, very hard habit to break.

I have literally never heard it called OS Ten. Today I learned.

Might be due to the fact that for lots of ESL speakers, the "ine" in "engine" makes little sense when you consider "quine", "spine", "spline", "brine", etc. The cognitive load to recognize that nginx is really engine-x is that much bigger.

As I like to say, "Give someone a ghoti, he can speak English for a day, tell them how to ghoti, and they can speak English for a lifetime".

'gh' pronounced 'f' is always word-final, and 'ti' pronounced 'sh' is always word-medial. "ghoti" is correctly pronounced "goaty".

On my case that's the opposite, I've almost never heard people pronouncing the official way and always heard "n-jinks", that's how I pronounce it myself. I know about the rationals of the official pronunciation but never got used to it.

I've only ever seen it written, how do you pronounce it?

engine-x, right? (as explained on their home page)

http://nginx.org/en/

The de facto and possibly de jure pronunciation is engine-ex.

Thank you. It's been n-jinx in my head for about 5 years now.

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