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Pronunciation Guide for Unix
- aynawn 4y agoI never thought about how the ampersand looks like a duck.
- nerdbaggy 4y agoIt 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
- Scubabear68 4y agoI don’t understand. “!” is bang. Full stop.
- acherion 4y ago> Full stop I think you mean 'dot'.
- midislack 4y agoLinux is 'lhee-nucks' you can reference sillysounds.au and check yourself!
- vincent-manis 4y agoI 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.
- amyjess 4y agoAlso I'm fairly sure "shebang" is a contraction of "sharp bang".
- texaslonghorn5 4y agois it not short for hash bang (#!)?
- e40 4y agoThis is what I've always called it and seen it called.
- paulannesley 4y agoLooks 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)#Etymology
- jonathanoliver 4y agoI've been chroot wrong for years. I learned recently that it's "shroot" not "C. H. root"
- na85 4y agoI've always been partial to "khroot"
- dude187 4y agoI've always just said "change root"
- user3939382 4y agoI say “chuh root” like the ch in choo choo train.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoI've already said "ch root", with no gap between the sounds.
- evilc00kie 4y agotshroot (or german tschrut), like shoot with leading t and an r inbetween
- stevenjgarner 4y agoDoes that imply "shmod" for chmod?
- Zenst 4y ago! 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".
- LeoPanthera 4y ago"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.
- ipnon 4y agoIt's also "bang" at my Midwestern university.
- ss64 4y agoI have added "swan hyphen" to the page now.
- Zenst 4y agoThank you, was and still is one of my favorite terms.
- Handytinge 4y agoOff 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!
- pyuser583 4y agoI once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”
- alisonatwork 4y agoI 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.
- labster 4y agoNowadays, vi is pronounced “vim”.
- numeromancer 4y agoThe latest pronunciation is "n'vim". Cf "n'wah".
- pyuser583 4y agoI’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?
- alisonatwork 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- plaguepilled 4y agoComma is 'tail'? The fuck?
- NylaTheWolf 4y agoI 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!
- ape4 4y agoUSR=User system resources, right. I still think that's a backronym.
- aeldidi 4y agoSupposedly, 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/074114.html http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...
- NylaTheWolf 4y agoOh really? That's so fascinating. TIL!
- LeoPanthera 4y agoI think there's some considerable debate about that. "User" is quite common, and certainly not wrong.
- icedchai 4y agoIt is a shortening for “user”. The “acronym” was made up later (and is BS.)
- VTimofeenko 4y ago> ¤ > 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"
- alisonatwork 4y agoIt'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.
- kergonath 4y ago> 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?
- ragingrobot 4y agoThey 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.
- nonamenoslogan 4y agoI’ve always called \ a ‘whack,’ but not sure it was rooted in Unix.
- drewzero1 4y agoOne of my coworkers (a very reluctant computer user) calls it a "backscratch".
- kens 4y agoThe 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.
- zoomablemind 4y agoNot 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!
- ipnon 4y agoI know Linus is pronounced with an "eye" sound but I still call it "lynn-ucks".
- gattilorenz 4y ago"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.
- gattilorenz 4y agoThis is the original audio I was referring to: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg 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) :)
- dredmorbius 4y agoHell, 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.
- bartvk 4y agoIsn't it "Lih-nux"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c39QPDTDdXU
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mountaineer 4y agoWhere is the pronunciation guide for daemon?
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoFerengi own the rights
- _notathrowaway 4y agoThey will gladly sell it to you... For the right price that is.
- scarby2 4y agoit 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
- nequo 4y agoThat'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."
- mathieuh 4y agoIn 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.
- nequo 4y ago> 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?
- Symbiote 4y agoThe 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.
- veltas 4y agoI 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.
- makach 4y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription), I was expecting that we could settle on gif once and for all.
- na85 4y agoOnly godless savages and the sort of people who talk at the theatre pronounce it with a soft G.
- implements 4y agoBut it does allow the traditional “Beware of geeks bearing gifs!” quip.
- michaelcampbell 4y agoAnd put toilet paper rolls on with the "feed" side towards the wall.
- revolvingocelot 4y agoAh 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)
- na85 4y agoThe hard G is heavenly, sublime, and the patrician's manner of pronouncing it.
- bartvk 4y agoThey 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".
- veltas 4y ago'hash' is better known and one syllable, much prefer saying that over 'octothorpe'.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- apatheticonion 4y agoI used to call grep "Gee, rep".
- netfortius 4y agoThis 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...
- tominous 4y agoMy 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.
- EndorphinRush 4y ago+1 for the Dub Club
- overthemoon 4y agoI do the same. It has always annoyed me that we have a 3 syllable name for the letter W.
- charlieo88 4y agoAlways jangles the nerves hearing people saying Gee esss dou·ble U 111 2222 333 444 5 for Gun shot wound 111 2222 33333
- Phrenzy 4y ago...and it looks like two vees.
- mfontani 4y ago"vu vu vu" in Italian
- hacker_aide 4y agoSince www is pretty much unnecessary today, I'm hoping it just goes away.
- jwiz 4y agoIt'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").
- 4y ago
- avnigo 4y ago> - 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/pronunciation-of-sign-particularly-in-unix-commands https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191807/pronuncia...
- turbocon 4y agoYou 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.
- Handytinge 4y agoI'm a fellow tac lover and am spreading it also!
- binarymax 4y agoMy 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.
- bombcar 4y ago"vi is pronounced six, it rhymes with emacs" where you pronounce it "emix".
- YuccaGloriosa 4y agoemix is the New Zealand version
- acbart 4y agoOkay, yes, I agree that := is "becomes", because I grew up with Pascal, but we must acknowledge that it's a Walrus, too.
- egypturnash 4y agoFrom 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.
- notjulianjaynes 4y agoThere's also such thing as an interrobang: ‽ Presumably interrogate = ? bang = ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
- numeromancer 4y agoUrbit has made it's own (characteristically idiosyncratic) syllabary for ASCII symbol pronumciation: https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/A-intro#pronouncing-hoon https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/A-intro...
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoNo guide on Unix commands, but I will absolutely die on the hill that "sudo" should be pronounced "pseudo" instead of "soo-doo."
- Phrenzy 4y agoGif. It's pronounced Gif, not Gif.
- MiddleEndian 4y agoExactly. G as in `giraffe`, I as in `ice cream`, and F as in `of`
- ss64 4y agoThanks for all the feedback, I just updated the page with some of your suggestions!
- hacker_aide 4y agoChevrons 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.