Pronunciation Guide for Unix | Hacker News Reader

Pronunciation Guide for Unix

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106 pointsblondin121 comments

My favorite troll prank is when people say ‘vi’, I correct them and say it’s pronounced ’six’. I’ve been milking that one for years. Perhaps I’m a Roman numerologist at heart.

"vi is pronounced six, it rhymes with emacs" where you pronounce it "emix".

emix is the New Zealand version

From the derivation section for !’s pronunciation as “bang”:

Alternatively it could have come from comic books, where the words each character utters are shown in a "balloon" near that character's head. When one character shoots another, it is common to see a balloon pointing at the barrel of the gun to denote that the gun had been fired, not merely aimed. That balloon contained the word "!" -- hence, "!" == "Bang!"

I have read extensively through the history of comics, I make them myself, and I don’t think I have ever seen a depiction of a gun firing whose noise is delineated by a word balloon coming from the gun that simply says “!”. Usually the sound would be shown as a “sound effect”, which is just a large word floating in the air near the gun, not contained in a word balloon. And this word would usually be BANG!. With or without the !; it’s very common for sound effects to be unpunctuated.

There's also such thing as an interrobang: ‽

Presumably interrogate = ? bang = !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

> ¤ > Sonne

So that's what that symbol meant on the good old КУВТ-2. Now my life is complete.

Having learned Unix-y stuff in non-English environment, I still pronounce a lot of things in a weird way despite having very little accent otherwise. /etc will always be either "ye-t-k" or "ye-t-tse" and yum will be "yu-oo-m"

It's fun working with people from different countries who have developed their own regional pronunciation. I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H. I like that a lot of common tools don't really have a canonical pronunciation because they have spread in use far beyond the English-speaking world. I wonder if in a distant future where languages have developed to the point of being unintelligible to today's humans they'll still be running software with mysterious incantations like ioctl and malloc and so on.

> I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound. Other people (including me) pronounce both letters C and H

There is something satisfying in saying “shroot” or “shown”. It never occurred to me that C and H could be pronounced separately, aren’t they an abbreviation for “change” or something like that?

They are indeed an abbreviation for "change". change {root,own(er),mod(e),gr(ou)p}...

I am one of those who say "c-h-..." as well. For some reason I find it less awkward to say than "shroot."

Perhaps the first thing I think of with "ch" is the hard C or K, like "character." That sound wouldn't work in those cases. 'Kroot', 'kown', eh... no, so "C-H-..." it is.

On that note the page mentions"char" at the top, lists "care" and I more frequently hear others use "char" as in to burn. In my groups I think I'm the only one that pronounces it as first syllable of the actual word.

>pronounce both letters C and H

Do you mean C as in "s" sound or as in "k" sound, or...?

Oh, the "ctl"s... I got used to pronouncing it at "ka-te-el".

I think they mean "see aitch root"

> I recall French colleagues pronouncing a lot of stuff that commonly starts with ch- (chroot, chmod, chown etc) with a sh- sound.

Some other annoying pronunciations I sometimes hear are "yoom" and "pooty" for Yum and Putty. Yet for some reason they get GRUB right, I haven't figured out why.

English isn't a phonetically consistent language (ex, "u" sounds different in "put" and "dug") so I guess it can be confusing to some when needing to pronounce a new product name.

> I guess it can be confusing

It it confusing, yes. You can understand it through tough thorough thought though.

Obligatory "If English was phonetically consistent":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A8zWWp0akUU

When I'm thinking "change ownership" I pronounce it ch-oh-n with a long O, but when I just read it in context I can't help but pronounce it like "clown".

Lately I've been listening to Linux-related podcasts and it always takes me a couple of seconds to figure out what they're talking about when they say stuff like "slash et-see". (Which is fantastic, because it recalls "&c", et+c.)

I don't want to blame “sharp” for # on Microsoft. Back in the 1970s, it was the standard pronunciation around the University of BC. And in those days, many terminals and other output devices were somewhat low-fidelity, so the difference between the octothorp and the sharp would not have been visible.

Also I'm fairly sure "shebang" is a contraction of "sharp bang".

is it not short for hash bang (#!)?

This is what I've always called it and seen it called.

Looks like that's a leading theory:

> … may have come from an inexact contraction of SHArp bang or haSH bang, referring to the two typical Unix names for them. Another theory on the sh in shebang is that it is from the default shell sh …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#Etymology

My mind was blown when visiting Sweden in 2002 and finding out they pronounce "www" as "vee vee vee" (not just because the letter name double-v makes much more sense than double-u, but because they were smart enough to shorten it in this case).

Since then I've pronounced it in English as "dub dub dub" and found people generally understand it. I hope it catches on.

+1 for the Dub Club

I do the same. It has always annoyed me that we have a 3 syllable name for the letter W.

Always jangles the nerves hearing people saying

Gee esss dou·ble U 111 2222 333 444 5 for Gun shot wound 111 2222 33333

...and it looks like two vees.

"vu vu vu" in Italian

Since www is pretty much unnecessary today, I'm hoping it just goes away.

It's been a long time since I've said "www" out loud, but I always say "wuh wuh wuh" (like the first sound in the word "wood").

Seems that 'vee vee vee vee vee vee' would be more accurate.

I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”

I care zero, it's still "F stab" to me. And URL is "earl". But despite favoring the short version for those two, I always spell out every letter of SQL, and pronounce etc as "et cetera". None of it is consistent or rational and it doesn't matter because pretty much all of the time people know exactly what you mean. Perhaps I was lucky that one of my first bosses who'd been using UNIX since the 80s pronounced vi like the first two letters in violin. First and only guy I ever met who said it that way, but we all still knew what he meant.

Nowadays, vi is pronounced “vim”.

The latest pronunciation is "n'vim". Cf "n'wah".

I’m glad they corrected me, because I hadn’t realized the “fs” was short for file system.

I still don’t know what “-tab” is about, but it’s used a lot in /etc. Maybe because the file formats use \t as separators?

I think tab and table come from the same root. Tab stops existed on typewriters prior to tab keys on terminal keyboards, and I presume it was a shortening of tabulation stop, i.e. a way to more easily input data in a tabular form or a table. So I always internally read fstab as "file system table" and crontab as "chronology table", or something similar.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tabulate

I once worked with someone who pronounced SQL files as "squalls". That was the weirdest and most creative pronunciation I've heard.

In the 80's I worked with a guy who had a theory that most people who grew up with SQL in the early days pronounce it "sequel", and the younger generation was more used to saying it as the letters; S-Q-L.

At $PREVIOUSJOB I worked with a guy from Boston who pronounced "query" as "quarry". But he had a lot of bizarre pronunciations, so we just let it go. And not just because Boston, either.

AFAIR when SQL was introduced there were rumors that IBM decided to use SQL for its name because there was another language called Sequel. So they used an acronym (full name was Structured Query Language).

At one job I had at all agreed that 'Sequel' was dumb and 'Squirrel' would have been better.

I tend to pronounce it “squeal” myself.

And IRC is irk

You should not feel any shame at being the victim of *nix's anarchic names.

I can still recall, with Proustian clarity, my feelings upon learning 'cat' and, simultaneously, that it stood for 'concatenate': "but surely in 99% of cases you are 'catting' a single file, so that name makes no sense". Was I wrong? I was not.

Reminds me of the brain fart I had one day looking at a ps output that had line wrapped and wondering what the heck the "c lock" process was. I felt foolish about ten seconds later.

> - Hyphen: minus (sign), dash, dak, option, flag, negative (sign), worm, bithorpe

Instead of dak, I've heard this and tend to use it as tac instead, which apparently originates from flag separators in the Navy [0], so there is some logic behind it.

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191807/pronuncia...

You have solved a mystery that has plagued me for years, thank you!

tac took off at a former company of mine and I really like it. The hard t and k sound make it a much a better word than dash if you're describing a set of command line options.

I'm a fellow tac lover and am spreading it also!

it confuses me that he lists brackets as [] but not for ().

() are brackets [] are square brackets and {} are curly brackets.

certainly if you're from the UK and in maths class grew up being told about: BODMAS - Brackets, Orders Division, Multiplication, Addition Subtraction

I believe PEMDAS is more common in the USA

That's interesting. Wiktionary says that brackets are () in the UK but [] in the US, and that other brackets are called different things to disambiguate them.

Using "brackets" for parentheses certainly sounds odd to me even though I never learned "PEMDAS."

In the UK:

() are brackets

[] are square brackets

{} are curly brackets

<> are angle brackets

in school I don't think I ever heard the word "parentheses" used to refer to (), or at all for that matter.

> in school I don't think I ever heard the word "parentheses" used to refer to (), or at all for that matter.

Only in maths or ever?

The word parentheses is very rarely used in Britain.

(Brackets), [square brackets], {curly brackets or braces} and <angle brackets> are the terms used in all fields, maths and normal life included.

I heard it (in UK) referring to { }.

In programming circles I've come to expect: () parens, [] brackets, {} braces. Probably easier if we all try to stick to that.

Yes, as someone who lives in the UK I call () parenthesis, [] square brackets and {} curly braces to make it (somewhat) clearer. I pronounce root and route differently for the same reason. But I'm a foreigner so I can take some liberties :)

This also in the US, and < > as elbow brackets.

That chimes with my experience in the UK.

I personally call ( ) "round brackets" to try and be a bit more explicit about which kind of bracket I mean, but I don't think that's a very common turn of phrase. Similarly I've picked up calling { } "brace brackets" from programming.

I remember it as “Bless My Dear Aunt Sally”.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally in my classes. Fascinating!

From my kids' school maths I know this rather as BIDMAS - with the 'I' standing for indices (i.e. powers), which makes more sense, no?

For my own part, I don't remember any fancy acronyms being rolled out to help us remember this stuff when I were a lad. Kids today grumble grumble etc.

IIRC it was changed in the curriculum at some point, since we had both BODMAS and later BIDMAS. I imagine it was done for the reason you gave, it does make more sense

When I was in school, we only used apostrophe, comma, open and close paren, exclamation point, question mark, dollar sign, and period. Maybe a percent sign in later years. Of course my exposure to computers in those days was watching TV when the announcer took a stack of (punch) cards from a card sorter and called it a computer (UNIVAC IIRC).

BEDMAS in Toronto Canada in the early 2000s.

! Exclamation point exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, not (UNIX) (C), dammit (UNIX)

Deeply sadened there is not entry for this with "splosh dot", as that and "bang" are the ones everybody I've worked with used over past 3 decades, though mindful that may well be a local cultural thang from the UK.

As for ~ even sadder there is not entry for "swan hyphen".

"Pling" seems to be uniquely British, with usage sometimes documented as in the Commonwealth countries too.

Its actual origin seems to have been within Acorn Computers, and thus spread mostly to countries where Acorn computers were sold in any numbers, which notably does not include the USA.

On Acorn computers, application bundles are directories prefixed with a Pling, so the Paint application is called "!Paint", pronounced, "Pling Paint", for example.

It's also "bang" at my Midwestern university.

I have added "swan hyphen" to the page now.

Thank you, was and still is one of my favorite terms.

Off topic, thank you for the wonderful website you run! It's a trove of information, and has saved me many, many times over the years!

I am glad to see that I have been properly indoctrinated. A little bit disappointed that it doesn't clarify how to pronunciations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription), I was expecting that we could settle on gif once and for all.

Only godless savages and the sort of people who talk at the theatre pronounce it with a soft G.

But it does allow the traditional “Beware of geeks bearing gifs!” quip.

And put toilet paper rolls on with the "feed" side towards the wall.

Ah yes, the Giraffics Interchange Format. If the hard G is sinful, I will turn to face Jod and walk backwards into hell (with apologies to @dril)

The hard G is heavenly, sublime, and the patrician's manner of pronouncing it.

I only recently learned that /usr was an acronym and not just a shortening of "user". Are we supposed to say each letter??? I've been pronouncing it as "user" this whole time!

USR=User system resources, right. I still think that's a backronym.

Supposedly, usr was supposed to be “user”[0] but was switched after the Unix guys needed more disk space and split the file system into the / and /usr mount points.

Then /home was made because /usr was filled up with other things.

[0]: Rob Landley of busybox fame recalled on the busybox mailing lists some ten years ago http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...

Oh really? That's so fascinating. TIL!

I think there's some considerable debate about that. "User" is quite common, and certainly not wrong.

It is a shortening for “user”. The “acronym” was made up later (and is BS.)

No guide on Unix commands, but I will absolutely die on the hill that "sudo" should be pronounced "pseudo" instead of "soo-doo."

The article says the name "bang" for ! "comes from old card punch phenomenon where punching ! code made a loud noise". That's nonsense since every character makes a loud noise when punching a card. I've never noticed any excess noise from ! but I'll check at the CHM next week to see if I can conclusively disprove this.

Not sure about a punchcard, but an old typewriter I once stumbled upon had a noticeable bang on the !, on cheaper paper it even sometimes punched through the dot part of !

Though it may have been just that particular typewriter and tuning would have fixed it.

P.S. Turns out the very old typewriters did not have an exclamation point key at all! One had to construct it using a period, backspace, apostrophe aka single-quote. Good times!

Urbit has made it's own (characteristically idiosyncratic) syllabary for ASCII symbol pronumciation:

https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/A-intro...

Where is the pronunciation guide for daemon?

Ferengi own the rights

They will gladly sell it to you... For the right price that is.

I've been chroot wrong for years. I learned recently that it's "shroot" not "C. H. root"

I've always been partial to "khroot"

I've always just said "change root"

I say “chuh root” like the ch in choo choo train.

I've already said "ch root", with no gap between the sounds.

tshroot (or german tschrut), like shoot with leading t and an r inbetween

Does that imply "shmod" for chmod?

Comma is 'tail'? The fuck?

Okay, yes, I agree that := is "becomes", because I grew up with Pascal, but we must acknowledge that it's a Walrus, too.

I don’t understand. “!” is bang. Full stop.

> Full stop

I think you mean 'dot'.

They focus on command-line stuff but the graphical stuff is pronounced in various ways as well. For instance, I'm not sure where I got it from, but The X Window System is either "X" or "The X Window System", but not "X Windows". There must be other "rules".

'hash' is better known and one syllable, much prefer saying that over 'octothorpe'.

Chevrons are designations of "rank" not rating. The US navy used the term rating but not to denote rank or at least not to denote ranks in general. I think a "rating" was a inexperienced person.

This is so funny, as - after 30+ years in US IT -, while working in a French office, one of my partners keeps asking me to press dièse [djɛz] on the keyboard, and I keep staring at him...

I’ve always called \ a ‘whack,’ but not sure it was rooted in Unix.

One of my coworkers (a very reluctant computer user) calls it a "backscratch".

It mentions /etc but doesn’t say how to pronounce it. I have always just spelled it out and gets so confused when people pronounce it

Same. It confused me when I heard people pronouncing it "et-see"; at least it wasn't "etcetera" though lol

Ayee, I say etcetera all the time...

Nor how to pronounce lib and bin.

Gif. It's pronounced Gif, not Gif.

Exactly. G as in `giraffe`, I as in `ice cream`, and F as in `of`

Linux is 'lhee-nucks' you can reference sillysounds.au and check yourself!

Thanks for all the feedback, I just updated the page with some of your suggestions!

I never thought about how the ampersand looks like a duck.

If that page is correct, it’s because Donald Duck is called Anders And in Danish(!).

He is indeed called Anders And but the only name I know in Danish for & is "og-tegn" (and-sign).

We don't call it ampersand because that comes from the English "and per se and".

I used to call grep "Gee, rep".

I know Linus is pronounced with an "eye" sound but I still call it "lynn-ucks".

"Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and this is how I pronounce Linux: Linux."

In the old days I configured my sound card enough times that this sentence is burned in my auditory cortex.

This is the original audio I was referring to: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg

Turns out, as usual, human memory can suffer from bit corruption (but it's not stochastic) :)

Hell, I straight up had that in my init sequence (I believe appended to the end of /etc/init.d/audio or something like that), so it played every boot.

Isn't it "Lih-nux"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU

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