# How do you pronounce "GIF"?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-pronounce-gif/485417>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [February 11, 2009, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-pronounce-gif/485417 "2009-02-11T20:28:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2009, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-pronounce-gif/485417/61 "2009-02-14T22:38:41Z")

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> [@AppallingGael](#):
>
> Gibe and gill (liquid measure) are other more-or-less common exceptions. “Ge-” yields many counterexamples, including gee, gel, gem, and germ. I don’t think the one-syllable rule works even as a guideline.

Almost all of those are shortenings of longer words.

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**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2009, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-pronounce-gif/485417/62 "2009-02-14T23:10:31Z")

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Wait, ASCII isn’t pronounced “ushy”?

Whaddaya know, I’m correct to pronounce PNG as “ping”! See what intuitive design can do for ya?

Years & years ago, in Windows 3, I used to use the suffix .gyf for bitmaps, as a way of personalizing the file name. I don’t know where’d I’d seen GIF’s before that, but I guess I had. I used the _y_ because it evoked the word “glyph”–which of course has a gamma sound.

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