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What's The Correct Way to Pronounce 'GIF'? (thenewstack.io)
"Apparently we're all fighting about how to pronounce 'GIF' again on Twitter," writes technology columnist Mike Melanson:
I personally find the argument of web designer Aaron Bazinet, who managed to secure the domain howtoreallypronouncegif.com, rather convincing in its simplicity: "It's the most natural, logical way to pronounce it. That's why when everyone comes across the word for the first time, they use a hard G [as in "gift"]." Bazinet relates the origin of the debate as such:
"The creator of the GIF image format, Steve Wilhite of CompuServe, when deciding on the pronunciation, said he deliberately chose to echo the American peanut butter brand, Jif, and CompuServe employees would often say 'Choosy developers choose GIF(jif)', playing off of Jif's television commercials. If you hear anyone pronounce GIF with a soft G, it's because they know something of this history."
Wilhite attempted to settled the controversy in 2013 when accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 17th annual Webby awards. Using an actual animated .gif for his five-word acceptance speech, he authoritatively announced his preferred pronounciation. However, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary argues that "A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it's out there," adding that "the pronunciation with a hard g is now very widespread and readily understood."
One linguist addressed the topic on Twitter this week, noting studies that found past usage of "gi" in words has been almost evenly split between hard and soft g sounds. Their thread also answers a related question: how will I weaponize a trivial and harmless consonant difference to make other people feel bad and self-conscious about themselves?
Her response? "Maybe just....don't do this."
"The creator of the GIF image format, Steve Wilhite of CompuServe, when deciding on the pronunciation, said he deliberately chose to echo the American peanut butter brand, Jif, and CompuServe employees would often say 'Choosy developers choose GIF(jif)', playing off of Jif's television commercials. If you hear anyone pronounce GIF with a soft G, it's because they know something of this history."
Wilhite attempted to settled the controversy in 2013 when accepting a lifetime achievement award at the 17th annual Webby awards. Using an actual animated .gif for his five-word acceptance speech, he authoritatively announced his preferred pronounciation. However, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary argues that "A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it's out there," adding that "the pronunciation with a hard g is now very widespread and readily understood."
One linguist addressed the topic on Twitter this week, noting studies that found past usage of "gi" in words has been almost evenly split between hard and soft g sounds. Their thread also answers a related question: how will I weaponize a trivial and harmless consonant difference to make other people feel bad and self-conscious about themselves?
Her response? "Maybe just....don't do this."
Because choosy nerds choose GIF!
For those overseas or under 30, it's a play on the old Choosy mothers choose Jif peanut butter commercial
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You don't call a JPEG a Jay-Pheg!!
Kriston
Outside of being the best format to store a 1x1 pixel image (usually for spacing in websites, although now better to use CSS), there's no benefits that GIF has these days over PNG. This was a discussion for eons ago, not 2019.
"The debate over how to pronounce GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, re-emerged this week when Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the widely used Web illustration, declared it should be pronounced “jif,” like the brand of peanut butter, rather than with a hard G sound."
Wish we could downmod the article as Troll.
When it stands for Jraphics Interchange Format I'll pronounce it with a soft g.
Instead of wondering how to pronounce it, we should be asking "who gives a shit?" This argument was all the rage in the BBS days, in 1989. Today, nobody uses gifs so who gives a shit?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
pea nnnn geee
Get with the times.
Its pronounced: ob-soh-leet.
It is superseded in every way by .png. Can we please stop using it already.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Easy, how do you pronounce JIF versus GIF, if you pronounce them the same, you probably have problem and are probably a Joat or is that Goat. Different ascents pronounce the same words differently, hence the recognisable accents. By the way, accurately, you are pronouncing it correctly if the person you are talking to understands what you are saying, if they do not and remember the intent is communicating with them, you are pronouncing incorrectly because they did not understand what you were trying to say, hence you failed at your attempt at communication. Proper pronunciation is for the receiver of the verbal communications and not the sender.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
As the other commenters say, even for animations and fixed palette images there are better, open options.
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Well, I don't pronounce girl "jirl"...
Clearly it's pronounced "yiff".
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm an old nerd and I always said hard g gif.
That said, I really don't give a rip. Use PNGs (pings BTW, not puhnugs) and be done with it.
Since, we don't give Geoff the gee sound either, although we appear to offer a phonetical alternative spelling.
Don't forget. We've deemed it appropriate to have shuggar on a Wed-nez-day in Feb-roo-ary.
It's also the way our language helps us determine when to ask, "You're not from around here, are you?" Looking at you, R-Kansas.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is Slashdot. We just don't pronounce 'girl' at all.
Animated ifs are great, gifs and jifs are silly.
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
I also say ess-sea-ess-eye
Wishing it, doesn't make it so. Neither does pissing your money away on a domain name.
Domain names are (generally) quite cheap. $10 or $15 / year to have some fun and/or make a point is no big deal.
Excellent point. We pronounce it Jay-Peg. Though if weâ(TM)re truly following the same logic, shouldnâ(TM)t we be pronouncing it Jehpegg?
Paul Lenhart writes words!
How do you pronounce giraffe?
Circumcision is child abuse.
It's pronounced like gigawatt. That is, with a soft g.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Well we are at it, we also need to resolve how to pronouce "lib", "bin", "char", and "vi".
"vi" is the worst. I have heard it pronounced "vee-eye", "vee", "vie" (like "pie"), and "six".
If CompuServe says it's "jiff", that just reinforces my belief that the hard g is the way to go.
#DeleteChrome
How do you pronounce giraffe?
Or ...
(a) "gyro" (gyroscope) [ pronounced: jiro ]
(b) "gyro" (tasty Greek food) [ pronounced: yero ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Giving a gift of a GIF is great!
Sites like Twitter use the term GIF in short videos but are just hosting the thing in video formats like MP4. Since that's not GIF anymore, it matters even less what the creator of the original format wanted it pronounced.
and hydrogenated vegetable oils, so I pronounce it ghif.
Then the creator should have learned to spell. Since they did not it is now and has always been pronounced with a hard throaty G sound.
Jraphics Interchange Format
Requiem for the American Dream
Or a gigantic gigolo. Or a giraffe.
It is pronounced like "JIF" the peanut butter.
Stupid jit.
Surely you jest. Everyone calls it "the six editor."
Kriston
So, Jay-IF?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And "etc" is properly pronounced etsy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How do you pronounce "git"?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It stands for Jgraphics interchange format so the pronunciation is obvious.
of why I do not have a twitter account! Or Facebook! I am smiling as I sit back in my desk chair and savor the moment with out main stream social media. Life is good. ;)
;)
Just my 2 cents
Language changes with usage, so hard and soft g both seem to be reasonable conclusions. If not, we can always keep going back, all the way to Old English:
the Old English word gif 'if' (pronounced "yiff")
(from a completely unrelated article about entries for the Universal Coded Character Set that has, of course, bounced around the internet since).
Jif is a brand of toilet cleaner in the UK and elsewhere. Mind you given the taste of peanut butter I suppose it is possible it is just the same product repurposed.
Interestingly they tried to rename it "Cif" a few years ago but my family back in the UK still just calls it Jif so if the trend continues soon it won't matter what the first letter is, "?if" will always get pronounced "Jif".
Damn slashdot, reposting questions that were answered in the days of Compuserve and BIX. Must be a new record on being slow to report something. ;-)
It's pronounced "gif".
For reference, see: https://imgur.com/gallery/RRKV...
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Darkness down that path lay... darkness and much scritchies.
If he had wanted it pronounced Jif, he should have spelled it as .JIF and not expect the whole world to violate some basic rules of grammar to satisfy him. But hey, CompuServe used to bill people $6/hr (300 baud) or $12/hr (1200 baud) so it's understandable they might be a bit full of themselves.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Clearly you meant the Gews. The ones who crucified Gesus.
Its Gif pronounced Jif, like the peanut butter. End of story. I can't help it if someone can't accept that.
CompuServe used it and if you never used CompuServe, you don't know jack.
The pronounciation seems to fit the language just fine.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
What other words start with 'gif'? Gift is one. Probably the most closely related word to gif. And it's got a hard G.
Stay where you are; we have a team on the way.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
That's easy. I pronounce it "vim".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The proof is here! http://dailyety.tumblr.com/pos...
...and our choosy mothers here would never choose "Jif" becase we pronounce our "J" like you pronounce your "Y", and it just sounds wrong somehow. Besides, we don't like the wimpy ways you pronounce your "G", anyway. :) Viel Glück!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Yap. It's the editor of the devil.
It's pronounced 'Graphics Interchange Format' or G - I - F, just like 'Portable Document Format' is pronounced P - D - F. We aren't about to argue how to pronounce 'pdf' as a word, are we?
The G in GIF stands for GRAPHICS, which doesn't start with a J sound. Therefore I, and many others, have pronounced GIF with a "hard" G since its inception as a file format, and we are not wrong to do so. I will argue this until I die, I am not kidding.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Jraffics, LOL. This is why it's a hard G - because it's about Graphics.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
nt
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
....just use PNG!
How very descent of you to say that.
Not true. People can correct for errors, but they're still errors. It's much harder work than listening to someone who doesn't need decoding.
This applies in writing too. The middle sentence of your post is a fucking train wreck.
Your advice on language usage ranks right up there with Stephen Hawking's guide to rollerblading.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ya, whatever. It's his acronym, he can choose how it's pronounced. There are no English acronym pronunciation rules. Is it ok to pronounce POTUS like everyone else, or do you insist on it being pronounced putt-yoos (ptyoos).
Lighten up, dude.
Which language, though? J sound before i or e is the rule in Italian. Of the words you used gentle, giants & angels are from that side of the family. Orange is Spanish, though it should be norange.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is all connected. The "Jif" brand used to be called "Vim" in my country.
https://youtu.be/MSJaSS_Zj0Y
#DeleteFacebook
There's a gigantic gigabyte gif in my git repo Giles!
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Gif: The gift that keeps on giving.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
What the hell is this "girl" thing you're speaking of? Is that in the same category as "sun" and "outside"?
#DeleteFacebook
Six is actually funny.
I played once with an america ex soldier Eve Online. There are planets and the planets have moons, both are numbered using roman numbers. He insisted calling "lets warp to planet vie eye eye and moon eye eye eye" ... So I asked: "you are aware that this are roman numbers?" He was confused and answered "yes, and that is how we pronounce them in the field" (not sure if that is true - we simply pronounce them by saying the number, never heard any one else spelling them out letter by letter).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Seriously now.
Emacs vs. Vim anyone?
Tabs vs. Spaces? (It's tabs, btw. but since the Space morons are always are quick to set the standards I play along when a project is standards compliant).
Bottom line:
Quabbles like these show that we have nothing other than first world problems, which is a good thing.
Be glad and perhaps help someone in need close by, but please stop debating this stuff for longer than 90 seconds per year.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Both in greek and german pronounced with an ordinary (hard?) G. (The word prefix is greek, btw. )
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
English is retarded.
Well, one of the least retarded languages out there.
But still retarded.
Look at e.g. Polish. Every letter has its own sound.
Every. Well, almost: there are two-sounds like sz, cz.
You can actually *read* Polish, not guess the pronunciation. Even one letter at a time. So handy for children learning this beautiful language...
How fscking retarded one must be to have spoken language, which consists of limited number of well-known sounds, and create a written language in which letters do not match these sounds?!
I can promise you the linguist didn't write that. No linguist worth their salt would use an extra dot for an ellipsis-as-a-comma.
Slashdot writers probably shouldn't either.
...
If they're pronouncing it in the field, and pronouncing th letters, then it should have been pronounced
"Let's warp to planet Victor India India and moon India India India"
I pronounce it as camelopard.
- Raynet --> .
"An out of date obsolete format pressed into a use it was never designed for"
Honestly, it only supports up to 256 colours. It uses LZW compression which is only useful for images created in a pixel based paint program. It can be used for poor quality animations, but its lack of worthwhile compression means we end up with huge files.
how is gif dumber than jif? do you pronounce gift as jift?
Can't we go back to discussing about Trump?
He explains the illogic of when people say "since G stands for Graphical, therefore its a hard G". And gives a lot of irrefutable examples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Can we just get rid of soft-G in general?
If your goal is for me to make the J sound, write a J.
Likewise, C, S, and K.
-Dave
GIF has not changed much in tech since 1989 (it was developed in 1987). For most of its existence it had been pronounced with a soft g, like "jif". That means that in its 32 year existence MOST people had called it with a soft-g. Meaning, gif wasn't simply invented recently as a way to pass animated memes on social media.
Anyway, it wasn't until gif's resurgence in popularity among the (primarily) Millenials to pass animated imagery via instant messaging and other social media that its pronunciation was rechristened by them to be a hard "G", because after all "GIF" looks like the shortened version of "GIFT" and they are kinda/sorta receiving a gift from a friend when they get an animated surprise message! Hooray!
Gif's CHANGED pronunciation -- to be a hard-G -- is actually a new occurrence in Gif's very long history. And so, for the young generation to think they somehow invented gif and now are trying to "teach" others how to pronounce it correctly kinda seems comical.
This whole mess could have been averted if APNG replaced the aging and horribly inefficient Gif. APNG is a better format. Yes GIF and APNG are both lossless, but APNG has much better compression, supports 24-bit color (gif only supports 256 colors), 8-bit transparency, and of course animation, but with much more granular control and options. It's also supported in all major browsers. But yet GIF just won't die already.
The presumption that there is only one "correct way" is a lie.
.
Way to make a strawman when you have nothing else to write about in your column. Make up that everyone is fighting about something. If one hundredth of one percent of "us" are fighting about this, I'd be surprised.
Video codecs that play in web browsers for iOS are patented. This means a user living in Slashdot's home country or another country with software patents has to purchase a licensed AVC encoder. GIF, by contrast, is no longer patented.
How do you provide a mask for a video that plays in a web browser so that some parts of each frame are transparent?
split the image in 256 color chunks and change palette for each animation frame showing each chunk
The sample animation you linked shows only one 256-color chunk animating at once. I'm interested to see a tech demo of multiple palette chunks animating in parallel. If you don't animate, you might as well use PNG.
when used for animations it provides no inter-frame compression at all. Each frame is run-length encoded separately.
GIF animations can "stack" a transparent frame on the previous frames. GIMP and numerous other GIF tools have a frame differencing feature that turns runs of pixels that match the previous frame into blocks of highly compressible transparency. This adds compression unless some pixels are changing from opaque to transparent or unless the scene has global motion.
The "I" is silent and the "F" is pronounced as if asking a question.
photosMy Photostream
Don't worry about it. Use PNGs.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
500 million Spanish speakers can't be wrong.
Jif is a a peanut butter. Gif is a Graphics format.
On the otherhand the worls might be a better place if we could gave something called Computer Giraffics. I don't know what it would be but the logo would be nice.
And I like Scooby do, so I prefe Scuba prononced Scooba.
And dont' get me started on FuBar and Ghoti.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How do you pronounce Wilhite??
Animated Gifs are quite common nowadays - often being used as 'reaction-images' in forums and social media. In fact, the Millennials call any moving image that isn't a 'video' a 'Gif'. Their main limitation is that they are limited to 8 bits per pixel (with a palette) - hence 256 colours. Seeing that nowadays, just about everyone uses 24-bit colour, the MNG and APNG formats did not take off despite having been around for more than 10 years (IIRC, Mozilla deliberately decided to drop MNG from their browser back in 2003(?) for reasons unknown to myself). An image such as this satisfying animation of tea being poured would look a lot better if it wasn't limited to 256 colours. I really hope that whoever created it kept the source-material.
Since the G in the acronym is short for Graphical the G in GIF is also pronounced the same as the word. Therefore it is pronounced GIF, not jif. Problem solved.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
dead or pronounced 'webm'. Actual .gif images died a while ago anyway yet the morons still eat up 'gfycat' or imgurs .gifv switcher. This is leading to a regression since people still type in 'how to make gif' and google tells them exactly how to make that shitty image format with zero p-frames.
This is some old-school Usenet-level argument going on in here. Makes me nostalgic!
I think you are confusing peanut butter with a cleaning product.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
we should ban gifs and end this whole pronounciation discussion which has been going on for decades and stop the flood of animated gifs.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
how many drinks I've had. and indeed it does become a soft G after a while.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Just drop the T.
That has the same G sound as graphics.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
What do brits have against peanut butter, anyway?
It tastes vile. It seems to be the North American equivalent of marmite or, for our Australian friends, vegemite. Somehow if you are exposed to these products as a young kid your body must develop some type of immunity to the taste to protect you. Thereafter you can safely ingest the stuff and possibly even pretend to enjoy it while for the rest of us the only protection we have is our gag reflex.