Is SQL pronounced "s-q-l" or "sequel"? | Hacker News Reader

Is SQL pronounced "s-q-l" or "sequel"?

12 pointskevinguy38 comments

I hear them both on a daily basis, neither are wrong. A classic article about this: http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-...

SQL is an initialism for Structured Query Language. So the correct pronunciation is "s-q-l". Acronyms have a natural flow and can be read as is (NASA, LASER etc.). Initialisms do not and must be read one letter at a time.

Grammar. It's magic.

Few language rules are absolute and universal. Language is, at its heart, an agreement among people about what words mean what. So the fact that many, many people say (and understand) "sequel" means that it can also be correct.

Except we are talking about the English language. And it does have rules, they are called grammar. Plus, you're using the bandwagon fallacy. Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it right.

First of all, "bandwagon fallacy" doesn't make sense here. If I said, "English as it's commonly used is correct because everyone tells me it is," you could say that I'm jumping on a bandwagon.

What I'm saying is that "English as it's commonly used is correct because that's what defines the language itself." Language is, by its definition, a function of bandwagoning.

Second, you're utterly wrong about there being hard and fast rules to language. It's important that you look this up, or you'll go through more of your life being upset about something trivial and subjective.

If you do a little googling, I'm sure you'll see that there is no central authority to define the rules of language. In fact, for any language, there are many competing standards.

The "rules" you seem to be referring to (which I'm not limiting to grammar, but also including pronunciation, syntax, etc.) are prescriptive. Someone codified them at some point, and they were adopted by a general population.

But there are also descriptive rules for language, which refer to how people actually speak and write. These are often incorporated into newly-published or newly-revised sets of prescriptive rules. Descriptive rules may also change due to prescriptions, as is the case of avoiding ending a sentence in a preposition.

So both prescriptive rules and descriptive rules are valid, and there's no single source of "truth" for any of them. Here are some examples of things that many people (you included?) probably think are forbidden in English but are actually fine:

- Ending sentences with prepositions[1][2][3]

- Splitting infinitives[4]

- Using "whose" to refer to inanimate objects[5]

1. http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/11/grammar-myths-pre...

2. http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2014/youve-been-lied-to-heres-...

3. http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/terminalpreposition...

4. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive: "As the split infinitive became more common in the 19th century, some grammatical authorities sought to introduce a prescriptive rule against it. The construction is still the subject of disagreement among English speakers as to whether it is grammatically correct or good style: "No other grammatical issue has so divided English speakers since the split infinitive was declared to be a solecism in the 19c [19th century]: raise the subject of English usage in any conversation today and it is sure to be mentioned. However, most modern English usage guides have dropped the objection to the split infinitive."

5. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23541/can-whose-r...

Do you pronounce smt88 as "S-M-T eighty-eight" or "smart-dude-who-knows-his-shit eighty-eight?"

Does English really have official rules?

I thought not, and that was why some dictionaries started adding words like "irregardless" (sic).

Maybe this is just a skewed point of view of a Spanish native speaker, as we have an official organism accepted by nearly all Spanish speaking countries, that looks after the language and updates the rules at least once per year.

Go read a copy of The Canterbury Tales in it's original english and tell if it follows those rules. Languages are not set in stone they evolve. Just because a lot of people do it is exactly what language "rules" are, nothing more.

If I follow your logic properly, then, when reading the sentence

"The disk with all the PNG files was read too frequently for the IDE controller, so we switched to a SCSI drive"

you would pronounce "PNG" as "Pea En Gee", "IDE" as "Eyed", and "SCSI" as "Ess See Ess Eye"? I would have pronounced "PNG" as "Ping", "IDE" as "Eye Dee Ee", and "SCSI" as "Scuzzy". I wonder if our differences are regional?

For the record, I pronounce "SQL" the same was that you do.

Is saying "Ping" actually a thing? I've only ever heard "P-N-G"

For what it's worth, the W3 pronounced it "ping", but this might just be a holdover from the 90s. I've honestly heard both.

http://www.w3.org/TR/PNG-Introduction.html

The language was originally called the Structured English Query Language, or SEQueL for short.

and because of a trademark dispute over the acronym SEQUEL, it was changed to SQL

Both, I often find that microsofties say sequel and open source guys say s-q-l, but that is just a personal observation.

I've noticed that as well

Back before I ever spoke to anyone about databases, I pronounced it to myself as "squirrel". Good times.

S Q L ...

Sequel is incorrect, but it often overtakes within a company if a few people don't realize this and start referring to it.

When I worked at Gupta Technologies back in the '80s and we wrote SQLBase and SQLWindows, we all pronounced it "sequel".

These were people who came from Oracle and such places, so I naturally assumed that this pronunciation was correct.

Who has time for 3 syllables? "Sequel"!!

"Se-quel" is 2 syllables.

And S-Q-L is 3, so "Se-quel" saves time. :)

Who has time for 2 syllables? "Squeal" (or "Squill", if you prefer shorter sounds) is clearly superior.

Neither-- it's pronounced "Gif".

Like the present or like the peanut butter?

Peanut butter makes a great present!

(Unless the recipient is allergic)

'Sequel', because even though it's grammatically incorrect, it rolls off the tongue much better.

"Sequel". But I also used to pronounce LED (light-emitting diode) as "lead" until I heard an optical engineer (with PhD) say "l-e-d" and felt stupid. "Ping"(PNG) still sounds weird to me but scuzzy(SCSI) and as-key(ASCII) don't. It's a mystery.

"s-q-l". It is ambiguous if pronounced "sequel". :)

Standalone, "s-q-l". In compounds--SQL Server, SQLDeveloper, PL/SQL, MySQL--usually "sequel". But again "s-q-l" in PostgreSQL and T-SQL.

Do I feel strongly about it? No.

Yes, and I don't mean to be snarky. I hear it each way.

When I worked with a lot of MySQL users, they tended to say "s-q-l". These days I'm in SQL server and they say "sequel".

Both are acceptable.

Hmmm, I've always said "sequel" but that's just because I heard someone else say it that way when I first heard of it.

I pronounce it "squirrel" just to troll people.

Pronounce it as a vowel-less word i.e.: "skwll"

i use both, randomly. It should be used for a pRNG.

Inside Microsoft: sequel, outside Microsoft: s-q-l

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