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Comment by polyrand | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic but:

  The reason for the "lite" in the name is that it doesn’t run a separate process, it doesn’t listen on a port or a socket, and you can’t connect to it.

The name doesn't really contain "lite". It's SQL-ite. So the suffix is "ite":

  The suffix "ite" is derived from the Greek word lithos (from its adjectival form -ites), meaning rock or stone [0]

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/34010

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From the horse's mouth (Hipp's): "I wrote SQLite, and I think it should be pronounced "S-Q-L-ite". Like a mineral. But I'm cool with y'all pronouncing it any way you want. :-)"

Me, I say "sequeLITE" with the emphasis on the last syllable, but now I'm thinking of switching to "SEQuelite". You'll never catch me pronouncing it "ess-cue-ell" either way dammit!

Yeah the first time I heard Hipp pronounce it, my brain glitched.

In my head, I call it "ess-kew-lite".

The Stack Exchange link is incorrect about -ite being etymologically derived from lithos, as one of the commenters there noted. Maybe a misunderstanding of this wiktionary note or similar:

> But by the Hellenistic period, both the masculine -ίτης (-ítēs) and the feminine -ῖτις (-îtis) became very productive in forming technical terms for products, diseases, minerals and gems (adjectives with elliptic λίθος (líthos, “stone”)), ethnic designations and Biblical tribal names.

The meaning of that is not that -ite is etymologically derived from lithos. It’s trying to say that mineral names like “hematite” (αἱματίτης - literally “blood-red”) are originally adjectives agreeing with an implied noun lithos.

Comments like this are why I read HN ...

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