Pronunciation of GIF

Uncommon card · No. 196219

The pronunciation of GIF, an acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format, has been disputed since the 1990s. Popularly rendered in English as a one-syllable word, the acronym is most commonly pronounced GHIF (with a hard g as in gig) or JIF (with a soft g as in gin), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G. Many public figures and institutions have taken sides in the debate; Steve Wilhite, the computer scientist who created the Graphics Interchange Format, gave a speech at the 2013 Webby Awards arguing for the soft-g pronunciation. Others have pointed to the term's origin from abbreviation of the hard-g word graphics to argue for the other pronunciation. Some speakers pronounce GIF as an initialism rather than an acronym, producing . The controversy stems partly from the fact that the pronunciation of an initial g is not standardized; the hard g prevails in words such as gift, while the soft g is used in others such as ginger. Linguistic analyses show no clear advantage...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Steve Wilhite, Public domain