gift - t
gif=jiff
beau=bow (as in “bow and arrow.” not “take a bow.”)
I’m with the soft g camp. I’ve never actually heard it pronounced the other way.
I thought GIF was pronounced “Pee Enn Jee”…
Come on, who still uses GIFs?
If that’s how it looks like it should be pronounced, then why doesn’t everybody pronounce it that way? To me it looks like it should have a hard G, like similar-looking words such as “gift”, “give”, “gill” and unlike similar-looking words like “gin” and “gist” 
jiff. I don’t think the pronunciation of the letters of the words that make up the acronym need to correspond to the pronunciation of the acronym itself. If that were the case, we’d pronounce laser lah-zheer. And scuba would be scuh-bah. And so on.
I’d be hard-pressed to find an acronym that does match the initial sounds exactly. GIF is just more noticable because it’s the first letter.
I pronounce it ‘Pee En Jee’
OK, I pronounce it with a hard G. (Does anyone still use GIFs?)
hard G.
The programmers and scientists I work with probably would catch on if I called it a brand of peanut butter, but no one I know would pronounce it that way.
I have to say as mentioned up-thread: Doc Brown nailed gigawatt. I still use a hard G and am corrected about once a month by other time travelers.
Exactly. I don’t have a problem with pronouncing it with a hard G, but the argument that it’s correct because “graphics” starts with a hard G makes no sense. Since when was the pronunciation of acronyms determined like this?
It looks like the hard-G side is winning, but I for one will never throw in the towel…
If someone said “jiff,” I would punch them.
Well, not really, but IN MY MIND…
Joe
I still use gGIF’s, since I have a collection of them. And they’re pronounced gift -t.
Besides, I didn’t think PNG files could be animated… 
I’ve always heard it pronounced like jif.
Another vote for soft g for two reasons:
- If you spell out the abbreviation, you say jee eye eff (see? soft G)
- Only a newb uses the hard G; back in the day, nobody said it with a hard G. If anyone did, they’d be ridiculed incessantly.
- I use JIF in my buckeyes. Why, yes, I am a choosy mom.
Gift, -t…never ever imagined it would be pronounced any other way.
For many a year, it’s been pronounced with a soft G.
GIF files are wonderfully small for some graphics (limited colors). They look far better than JPGs for some applications. So why not use them?
No, I didn’t say ALL graphics, but SOME graphics. You gotta know how they work to take advantage of them. Any artist who uses a JPG where a GIF would have been better doesn’t know the score and isn’t my kind of people.
You mean the peanut butter which is spelled JIFF? That’s just ridiculous. You’ve already got your J sound for J-Peg. You’re not taking GIF from us. No friggin’ way.
Huh. I work in email/web/graphic design, and I’ve never heard anyone (across 8+ years and multiple cities) pronounce it with a soft g. I pronounce it with a hard g because that’s how I’ve always heard it.
Yeah, I do. I’m not even sure PNGs would render consistently, much less well, in email clients – they have worse standards compliance than web browsers do. (We still have to use tables for layouts, too, because Gmail especially eats CSS for lunch. I heart Gmail in every other respect, but their compliance on this is awful. You know how web designers complain of having to write hacks into their code just to accommodate IE? It’s like that for email designers with Gmail – I have to write extra mark-up just for them.)
hard G
am I alone in pronouncing “PNG” like “ping”?
…probably
Good call.
Joe