My favorite troll prank is when people say ‘vi’, I correct them and say it’s pronounced ’six’. I’ve been milking that one for years. Perhaps I’m a Roman numerologist at heart.

From the derivation section for !’s pronunciation as “bang”:

Alternatively it could have come from comic books, where the words each character utters are shown in a "balloon" near that character's head. When one character shoots another, it is common to see a balloon pointing at the barrel of the gun to denote that the gun had been fired, not merely aimed. That balloon contained the word "!" -- hence, "!" == "Bang!"

I have read extensively through the history of comics, I make them myself, and I don’t think I have ever seen a depiction of a gun firing whose noise is delineated by a word balloon coming from the gun that simply says “!”. Usually the sound would be shown as a “sound effect”, which is just a large word floating in the air near the gun, not contained in a word balloon. And this word would usually be BANG!. With or without the !; it’s very common for sound effects to be unpunctuated.

> ¤ > Sonne

So that's what that symbol meant on the good old КУВТ-2. Now my life is complete.

Having learned Unix-y stuff in non-English environment, I still pronounce a lot of things in a weird way despite having very little accent otherwise. /etc will always be either "ye-t-k" or "ye-t-tse" and yum will be "yu-oo-m"

I don't want to blame “sharp” for # on Microsoft. Back in the 1970s, it was the standard pronunciation around the University of BC. And in those days, many terminals and other output devices were somewhat low-fidelity, so the difference between the octothorp and the sharp would not have been visible.

My mind was blown when visiting Sweden in 2002 and finding out they pronounce "www" as "vee vee vee" (not just because the letter name double-v makes much more sense than double-u, but because they were smart enough to shorten it in this case).

Since then I've pronounced it in English as "dub dub dub" and found people generally understand it. I hope it catches on.

I once had an insanely important job interview where I pronounced “fstab” as “F Stab” not “FS Tab.”

> - Hyphen: minus (sign), dash, dak, option, flag, negative (sign), worm, bithorpe

Instead of dak, I've heard this and tend to use it as tac instead, which apparently originates from flag separators in the Navy [0], so there is some logic behind it.

[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/191807/pronuncia...

it confuses me that he lists brackets as [] but not for ().

() are brackets [] are square brackets and {} are curly brackets.

certainly if you're from the UK and in maths class grew up being told about: BODMAS - Brackets, Orders Division, Multiplication, Addition Subtraction

I believe PEMDAS is more common in the USA

! Exclamation point exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, not (UNIX) (C), dammit (UNIX)

Deeply sadened there is not entry for this with "splosh dot", as that and "bang" are the ones everybody I've worked with used over past 3 decades, though mindful that may well be a local cultural thang from the UK.

As for ~ even sadder there is not entry for "swan hyphen".

I am glad to see that I have been properly indoctrinated. A little bit disappointed that it doesn't clarify how to pronunciations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription), I was expecting that we could settle on gif once and for all.

I only recently learned that /usr was an acronym and not just a shortening of "user". Are we supposed to say each letter??? I've been pronouncing it as "user" this whole time!

No guide on Unix commands, but I will absolutely die on the hill that "sudo" should be pronounced "pseudo" instead of "soo-doo."

The article says the name "bang" for ! "comes from old card punch phenomenon where punching ! code made a loud noise". That's nonsense since every character makes a loud noise when punching a card. I've never noticed any excess noise from ! but I'll check at the CHM next week to see if I can conclusively disprove this.

Urbit has made it's own (characteristically idiosyncratic) syllabary for ASCII symbol pronumciation:

https://developers.urbit.org/guides/core/hoon-school/A-intro...

Where is the pronunciation guide for daemon?

I've been chroot wrong for years. I learned recently that it's "shroot" not "C. H. root"

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Comma is 'tail'? The fuck?

Okay, yes, I agree that := is "becomes", because I grew up with Pascal, but we must acknowledge that it's a Walrus, too.

I don’t understand. “!” is bang. Full stop.

They focus on command-line stuff but the graphical stuff is pronounced in various ways as well. For instance, I'm not sure where I got it from, but The X Window System is either "X" or "The X Window System", but not "X Windows". There must be other "rules".

'hash' is better known and one syllable, much prefer saying that over 'octothorpe'.

Chevrons are designations of "rank" not rating. The US navy used the term rating but not to denote rank or at least not to denote ranks in general. I think a "rating" was a inexperienced person.

This is so funny, as - after 30+ years in US IT -, while working in a French office, one of my partners keeps asking me to press dièse [djɛz] on the keyboard, and I keep staring at him...

I’ve always called \ a ‘whack,’ but not sure it was rooted in Unix.

It mentions /etc but doesn’t say how to pronounce it. I have always just spelled it out and gets so confused when people pronounce it

Gif. It's pronounced Gif, not Gif.

Linux is 'lhee-nucks' you can reference sillysounds.au and check yourself!

Thanks for all the feedback, I just updated the page with some of your suggestions!

I never thought about how the ampersand looks like a duck.

I used to call grep "Gee, rep".

I know Linus is pronounced with an "eye" sound but I still call it "lynn-ucks".