nginx (“engine x”) is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server. […] [1]
I still pronounce it as “n-jinx” in my head.
References
- Title (website): “nginx”. Publisher: NGINX. Accessed: 2025-02-26T23:25Z. URI: https://nginx.org/en/.
- §“nginx”. ¶1.
I always thought the G stood for graphics, but now I know it stands for giraffics.
It doesn’t matter what it stands for. That’s not how acronyms work.
You don’t say “yolwa” for “YOLO”
You don’t say “Ah-ih-dees” for “AIDS”
You don’t say “britches” for “BRICS”
You don’t say “sue-knee” for “CUNY” (City University of New York) Etc.
And if you want to argue specifically about G:
You don’t say “Jad” for “GAD” (generalized anxiety disorder)
You don’t say “joes” for “GOES” (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)
It’s not a hill I’m going to die on, I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I’ve ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it “jif”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation
Now let’s talk about “gibs” you heathens.
I thought we were having a bit of a joke, but then you really went and gave me a gift of paragraphs.
I think the creator was keeping the joke running by saying that. The word gift is why people prefer to say gif over jif, it’s how we were taught to pronounce “gif”. The rest of the g words are irrelevant to be honest.
SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.
And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.
People forget in the 90s/00s both GIF and JIF were relatively common image file types. It was only logical to use the hard G for GIF. So that’s how we used it. This overrules all arguments of how acronyms work or what the creator originally called it.
Bah, I was there. .jif was barely used and came 5 years after. They should have used a different name!
Jrafics.