Pronunciation of file format GIF



While browsing the internet I found several cases in which people argue what the correct way to pronounce .gif is. There are two sides in this argument:



  1. People pronouncing it with a hard g as in gift. Argument for this is that since it is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format it should be spelled as g in the word graphic.

  2. People pronouncing it with g as in giraffe. Apparently the creators themselves stated in the documentation for the file that it should be pronounced as JIF, as quoted from Graphic File Formats FAQ:

    Choosy programmers choose "gif" or "jif"?


    The pronunciation of "GIF" is specified in the GIF specification to be "jif", as in "jiffy", rather than "gif", which most people seem to prefer.





The question is which side is right?



Answer



Wikipedia says:



The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF; /ˈdʒɪf/ or /ˈɡɪf/) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.



Based on the English pronunciation rule, whenever the letter g is follower by one of these vowels, e, i , or y, it'll have a /dʒ/ sound, otherwise, it'll sound like /g/. As every other rule, there might be exceptions to this, but in my opinion, if one wants to pronounce this word correctly, /ˈdʒɪf/ will be the correct pronunciation (I myself say /ˈɡɪf/ most of the time!).


P.S. The "hard g sound" that you mentioned above, is called palatalization in linguistics, which is not that known to most English speakers.


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