Like “wears”, it’s literally a corruption of “wares”.

This is one of those fascinating cases where the written word was created before the spoken one, whereas most other human words are the opposite, so it's hard to say which is 'correct' definitively.

I always went with 'WARES'.

holy moly, I think I've said it wrong my whole life now! I always said "war - ez" like "Juarez." "Wares" like "where's" with a Z sound makes a lot of sense. That's funny.

Related, a former colleague was mostly self taught and pronounces "attribute" as "a tribute." The first time I noticed this "mispronouncing in your head" was encountering the name Phobe in a book in high school. I read it as "foh-b" (long oh), not "fee-bee". I had no clue who this "fee-bee" person was that the teacher was talking about! haha

Wares. I swear they say it in the BBS Documentary: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQu...

when i was 10 or so, an older friend introduced me to pirated software, and gave me a burned cd-r with some video games and 'warez' written on it in sharpie. i asked my dad what 'wahr-ehz' was, and he told me it was a city in mexico. i was left slightly perplexed but assumed it had something to do with the provenance or distribution. it was at least five years before i figured out what it was supposed to mean.

This was a point of debate and arguments on BBS message boards back in the day. I don't think there was ever a definitive pronunciation.

However you like, both are permitted.

My warez project is codenamed Project Franklin, for example.

Like wears, as in short for 'softwares'