How do you pronounce "Gif"?

[Birdjaguar]

etc.

5 chairs

 

[BvBPL]

If you are speaking an acronym letter by letter in place of the words they represent the only way you can use more syllables than the actual words is if there are dou.ble.ewes in the acronym in place of words of two syllables or less. All other letter "names" are just one syllable so the best they can be is a break even.

Do people say double ewe oh double ewe, or just type it?

An acronym is neither an abbreviation nor spelled out letter by letter. Acronyms are pronounced, like radar, laser, and zip (code).

If you spell it out letter by letter then it is an initialism.

Fun fact, Americans tend to favor initialisms over acronyms, where as Europeans tend to favor acronyms, even making pronouncing things Americans would spell out.

 

[Gori the Grey]

If you are speaking an acronym letter by letter in place of the words they represent the only way you can use more syllables than the actual words is if there are dou.ble.ewes in the acronym in place of words of two syllables or less. All other letter "names" are just one syllable so the best they can be is a break even.

Do people say double ewe oh double ewe, or just type it?

Dude, how can you get the principle, get this close, and not get the answer?

Wow, just wow!

 

[BvBPL]

He's real close, in fact. It's starring him in the face.

 

[Quintillus]

I pronounce the g in gif the same way I do the g in jpg.

Which is to say, with Tim, that I'm not sure I've ever actually spoken the word at all.

(But I would pronounce it with a hard g if I were to.)

So, bigger question: how do you pronounce jpg?

No, what I mean is how does one pronounce jpg?

I pronounced it "jay-peg", as suggested by its four-letter file name, jpeg. The same way that Weird Al pronounces it at about 1:45 in the song It's All About the Pentiums.

GIF I pronounce with a hard G, despite it technically being incorrect. Old habits from before I knew it was supposed to be pronounced with a soft G.

You're not mixing gif with jpg are you?

PNGs do have better image quality than JPGs due to being lossless, but JPGs aren't inherently inferior. For images without crisp gradations such as computer text in them, the difference is rarely noticeable with decent JPG quality, and the JPGs take up considerable less space than PNGs. So they both have their use cases.

GIFs are inferior in almost all cases for single images. They are limited to 256 colors, and the compression in PNGs is almost always superior. However, GIFs are still often preferred for animated images. PNG's animated support splintered into two formats, APNG (animated PNG) and MPNG (multi-PNG), and neither gained the universal support that GIFs have. Thus, GIFs are often still used for sending animated images.

I pronounce it with a keyboard. Seriously, how often does gif come up in face to face conversation?

At least once a fortnight for me. Probably closer to once a week, sometimes more. My workers send each other a lot of GIFs.

 

[Antilogic]

Does anyone else call *.png files "pongs"?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

At least once a fortnight for me. Probably closer to once a week, sometimes more. My workers send each other a lot of GIFs.

C'mon man! I send vids to people too, and receive them as well. But if I tell my friend "hey I sent you a funny vid" I would fall over flat if they responded "is it a gif?" Who really CARES? You click on it, it opens, unless it's in some really screwed format and no one sends those because they never saw them either.

The only way I can imagine needing to use this term is in exactly the kind of conversation the rest of your post is...a discussion over relative qualities and merits of different formats. This may happen over coffee in certain (somewhat geek riddled) quarters, I suppose.

But, seriously, if someone sends you a funny vid have you ever responded with: "That was funny, but it would have been better if you reformatted it to a JPG man. What a loser you are." Really?

 

[Zelig]

PNGs do have better image quality than JPGs due to being lossless, but JPGs aren't inherently inferior. For images without crisp gradations such as computer text in them, the difference is rarely noticeable with decent JPG quality, and the JPGs take up considerable less space than PNGs. So they both have their use cases.

GIFs are inferior in almost all cases for single images. They are limited to 256 colors, and the compression in PNGs is almost always superior. However, GIFs are still often preferred for animated images. PNG's animated support splintered into two formats, APNG (animated PNG) and MPNG (multi-PNG), and neither gained the universal support that GIFs have. Thus, GIFs are often still used for sending animated images.

I was going to post most of this, but you beat me to it.

Animated PNGs are basically dead and won't ever see widespread adoption, html5 video has supplanted animated gifs for anything where animation is important.

I keep GIF animation disabled in all my browsers, because it's a dumb format.

C'mon man! I send vids to people too, and receive them as well. But if I tell my friend "hey I sent you a funny vid" I would fall over flat if they responded "is it a gif?" Who really CARES? You click on it, it opens, unless it's in some really screwed format and no one sends those because they never saw them either.

The only way I can imagine needing to use this term is in exactly the kind of conversation the rest of your post is...a discussion over relative qualities and merits of different formats. This may happen over coffee in certain (somewhat geek riddled) quarters, I suppose.

But, seriously, if someone sends you a funny vid have you ever responded with: "That was funny, but it would have been better if you reformatted it to a JPG man. What a loser you are." Really?

I just ignore people when the send me videos, eventually they stop sending them.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I pronounce the g in gif the same way I do the g in jpg.

Which is to say, with Tim, that I'm not sure I've ever actually spoken the word at all.

(But I would pronounce it with a hard g if I were to.)

So, bigger question: how do you pronounce jpg?

No, what I mean is how does one pronounce jpg?

"JAY-peg" (with an invisible "e").

Does anyone else call *.png files "pongs"?

My internal pronunciation is "ping". So ".png" rhymes with TNG ("ting") for me (TNG being the abbreviation for Star Trek: The Next Generation).

C'mon man! I send vids to people too, and receive them as well. But if I tell my friend "hey I sent you a funny vid" I would fall over flat if they responded "is it a gif?" Who really CARES? You click on it, it opens, unless it's in some really screwed format and no one sends those because they never saw them either.

The only way I can imagine needing to use this term is in exactly the kind of conversation the rest of your post is...a discussion over relative qualities and merits of different formats. This may happen over coffee in certain (somewhat geek riddled) quarters, I suppose.

But, seriously, if someone sends you a funny vid have you ever responded with: "That was funny, but it would have been better if you reformatted it to a JPG man. What a loser you are." Really?

I've no idea why you're carrying on about "vids." If you mean videos, I don't understand what they have to do with things like animated smileys.

 

[Hygro]

As almost everything I read and write, I do so aloud-in-my-head so I have no connection to the "I just type it" thing.

I stand by the hard g gif but have been slipping into jif thanks to the jerkface creator of the format. Seriously, the g stands for graphical, right? So why jraphical?


P.S. Lexicus you beat me too it. Funny every time.

 

[really]

I don't think I have ever said it out loud.

 

[Ryika]

Wait, it's not pronounced 'Yiff'? What's 'Yiff' then? Wait, let me google that quickly. Oh- ...oh my god.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

You're not mixing gif with jpg are you?

No it was just me being all "meta"

 

[Manfred Belheim]

GIF I pronounce with a hard G, despite it technically being incorrect. Old habits from before I knew it was supposed to be pronounced with a soft G.

Ugh... okay I'll bite. Why is this incorrect? Given that it's an initial for a word that begins with a hard G, in what was is pronouncing the acronym with a soft G "correct"? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of "the guy who invented it says so", which personally I wouldn't find that compelling.


Anyway, while we're at it, maybe we could pick apart all that is wrong (or right) with Doc Brown's "one point twenty-one jigawatts!!!"?

 

[Lexicus]

I say 'gif' all the time when me and my friends are quoting that lord of the rings gif I posted on page 1.

As for how to pronounce it, I don't live in the Kingdom of Jondor.

 

[BenitoChavez]

I pronounce it like "Gift" only without the "t".

 

[Arakhor]

Clearly, it's a hard G. Not only do the rules of English dictate that, but it also stands for ‘graphical’.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I've no idea why you're carrying on about "vids." If you mean videos, I don't understand what they have to do with things like animated smileys.

Vid, yes that means video...a series of images, hence animation. GIF is one of a multitude of formats for image files, hence a vid may be stored in GIF. Or it may not. When discussing the content of a vid, no one really cares about the file format.

Did that catch you up?

Note that in this conversation, which was typed, not spoken, GIF did get used as a word. But again, this is not a conversation I would ever foresee coming up in real life. Going all pedantic about file formats isn't something my real life friends tend to draw out.

 

[azzaman333]

It's gif, not jif.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Wait, it's not pronounced 'Yiff'? What's 'Yiff' then? Wait, let me google that quickly. Oh- ...oh my god.

I was thinking about that pronounciaton last night, but I don't think I'd do it like that