At each company-wide Automattic meetup, every employee is required to give a flash talk on a topic of his or her choosing. At our meetup last September, I gave a short overview of some of the programming terms I don’t pronounce correctly in my head, since I initially learned them on my own and took a guess at their pronunciation. Here are the slides from that fateful day.

I say “GIF”, but apparently lots of other people pronounce it “GIF”.

Get it?

I learned it as Ess-Cue-Ell and was very confused the first time someone asked me if I had worked with my sequel. “My sequel to what?”

Still not sure about this one. Thankfully, I never have to say it out loud.

I remember reading a newsgroup post where someone was ridiculed for calling it “C Pound.” That someone was not me, but it could have been.

Gee-You-Eye is not as fun as the correct gooey pronunciation.

My college roommate was a diehard Apple fan and especially loved their operating system, “Mackossex” (Mac OS X).

Firefox extensions use a file format called XPI, pronounced “zippy”, not “ex-pee-eye.”

For years, I thought that LaTeX was spoken the same as latex until I heard a professor mention that he had used “layteck” to typeset his papers. In my senior year of college. Dodged a bullet there.

I have a coworker from Iceland named Egill. It’s not “Ee-gill”, “egg-ill”, or “Ay-gill”. It doesn’t even have an L-sound if you say it properly, and I’ve been informed that because I’m not from Iceland, I probably can’t physically pronounce it.

As a public service, here’s a pronunciation guide to my name.