How to Pronounce “Varchar”

Who tf cares?

This article with the sections "Why I'm Right", "Why You're Wrong", and "Conclusion" is the perfect blogspam I'd expect from Viget. You guys don't have anything of value to say and I got this same "I'm better than you" treatment when I interviewed to be a dev at your shop years ago. I'm not salty because I got turned down; I'm responding today because you guys are pompous and are spreading that attitude with bad hiring practices in my area, and garbage blog posts in my neck of the internet.

> That Latin word "varius" is pronounced like "/vəˈɾiws/"...

What? No. It was pronounced /'waɾius/ in Latin: stress on first syllable, because the penult is light, then no schwa, but /a/, and no glide /w/, but /u/ (three syllables, not two)).

Looks like this person looked up the pronunciation of 'varius' in Wiktionary and copy-pasted the (Balearic) Catalan pronunciation (of a different word, spelled the same), which is the first to pop up...

> No one argues with pronouncing the first syllables of those words with the "air" sound.

I do.

Never met anyone who would rhyme the first syllable in "character" with "air" - maybe this is true in some US accents? I'm British and would say "character" as "kah-rik-tuh" or "kah-rak-tuh" which definitely has no "air" sound anywhere.

For me, by this logic, it would be "Vair-Kar"

I've been saying "vahr kahr" for so long that when I am in a discussion of biochar" I inevitably pronounce the "char" as "kar", try as I might to avoid that. I do wonder sometimes what my interlocutors think of it, but like the author of this piece, I don't care that much.

Also I hate discussions about biochar.

In postgres I pronounce it as: “text”

> The main argument that I see for other pronunciations is that shortening words should allow for different pronunciations based on these new spellings. This is a ridiculous argument that they are clearly just applying on a case-by-case basis depending on how they feel about any given word. For example, no one pronounces "limo" with the "I" sound found in "lime". Instead, they are pronouncing it like "limousine", exactly as shortened words should work.

I for one welcome our new karr datatype.

Many or most people use 'ch' when saying char, as a short for character. This has been determined by the internet. Variable has a strong 'a'. French speakers are often drunk, so frequent misunderstandings can happen.

Wahchah seems about right. This is clearly a wearchair:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71o0cILF2zL._AC_SY550_.j...

I know it is a joke, but even if you derive if from variable character, I wouldn't pronounce variable like "air". But I would say char and character are two different things. A character is a glyph, a char (pronounced like to char something) is a low level datatype.

And even then, English is full of cases where similar words are pronounced completely differently. Why is millimeter milli-meter, but calorimeter calo-rimmeter? Why is maintain pronounced main-tain or man-tain, but maintenance pronounced main-tennence? It doesn't have to make sense, that ship sailed a long time ago.

Ughh what a priss post, couldn’t even read without getting a migraine.

Char is short for character, people are going to pronounce it closest to the actual word, charred as in burnt. I don’t see how you can correct someone on a word that doesn’t officially exist in a dictionary, it’s a weird take.

These days people like to make petty rants and wrap “it’s a joke” around it. I don’t think it really divides wit from whining.

You don’t find this style of humor away from a keyboard often, it’s obnoxious, belittling, and boring.

The Old French "caractere" clearly has the "air" sound when you type it into Google Translate's French to English translator and hit that pronunciation button

> What are you on about? It clearly has the 'car' sound. It's not pronounced verker. It's varkar

varchar - both syllables pronounced with the 'ar' sound as in bar (or car, far, mar, tar, etc.)

so v-air-care makes sense because variable character. but i dont see the word 'varchar' as being connected to that shortening. so i say 'varcar' because i'm assuming my brain likes the rhyme.

varkar (rhymes with "bar bar")

Varr tsharr.