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Comment by eqvinox | Hacker News Reader

(really off-topic)

The Z on ETHZ is important, ETH on its own is just (loosely) "university", the Z makes it the Zürich one ;D. There is exactly one other: EPFL in Lausanne. (And you can technically call them EPFZ and ETHL if you really want to confuse people.)

(EPF [École Polytechnique Fédérale] is just the French version of German ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule]. Funnily enough both have pretty good international reputations, but due to the primary regional language being different are rarely recognized to be the same type of Swiss education entity.)

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Continuing with the off-topic, the E in ETH is pretty significant if you're going to loosely translate, as it stands for "Swiss federal", which is a big part of where those institutions' standing comes from.

Funnily enough that part is completely absent in the official French version… it's just "Fédérale" there… and shouldn't any of DE, FR or IT be valid as a "source" for a Swiss to English translation? So if you choose to do FR→EN, it's just "federal polytechnic institute"…

(… to be fair, yes, "Fédérale" translates to "eidgenössisch" when the source is known to be Swiss French / fr_CH, but still. Oh the joys of locale details and translating natural language…)

Half the reason I log onto HN is for the obscure random facts like these :) ty!

...yet, when saying "ETH" everyone knows what is being referred to. Except for crypto bros.

ETH Lausanne or Zürich?

I know about two newspapers who regularly say "ETH Lausanne", and I suspect these articles are written by similar pedants as some commenters here appear to be.

My original motivation in posting was really to spread the understanding that ETHZ and EPFL are sibling institutions; I knew both institutions from some comp sci bits but never made the connection until a while ago. And then I noticed a bunch of other people didn't connect them either…

(I mean, it's not super important to understand these two are related, but honestly I feel like it makes them even more impressive. ETHZ already has a MIT-like reputation, with EPFL not far behind. The Swiss are clearly doing something right with their technical universities. And it's a 100% quota too, these two are the only ETHs/EPFs.)

Internet points for you!

It is just its German Name.

Also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Domain

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