How the Hell Do You Pronounce GIF Anyway? [Video]

If it weren’t for Andy Milonakis tweeting that ” choosy web designers choose GIF,” I’d never be ready to remember a way to pronounce the damned file extension. Are Andy and I truly pronouncing it correctly though?

According to the folk at The Atlantic , yes.

Some digging into English etymology and pronunciation standards can have yielded mixed results, but there are two pieces of evidence discovered by The Atlantic’s staff which could serve as reassurance that we’re pronouncing things correctly. The first is found within the FAQ portion of a CompuServe graphics display bulletin called CompuShow:

” The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), pronounced ‘JIF,’ was designed by CompuServe and the official specification released in June of 1987.” [Which means that] in their personal document, the GIF’s creators indicate their preference for the soft-j.

The second piece of evidence was found in another very early FAQ on the topic:

Choosy programmers choose ” gif” or ” jif” ?

The pronunciation of ” GIF” is specified within the GIF specification to be ” jif” , as in ” jiffy” , other than ” gif” , which nearly all people seem to prefer. This does seem strange because the ” G” is from the word ” Graphics” and not ” Jraphics” .

So there you’ve got it: The peanut butter pronunciation is technically the perfect one to move with.

It’s ok whenever you’re a rebel and choose to head against what the creators of the GIF established anyway though, because the Oxford English Dictionary has your back as it declares both both the hard g and soft g pronunciations correct. [ The Atlantic ]

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This post is tagged: compuserve graphics, english etymology, gif specification, graphics interchange format, oxford english dictionary, personal document