Microsoft Word has it’s say on how to pronounce ‘GIF’
Steve Wilhite really set us geeks on fire this week. As the creator of the popular GIF image format he revealed that he preferred the soft-g pronunciation ‘jif’ (as in ‘jiffy’ or ‘gin’) not the commonly used ‘gif’ (with a hard G like ‘graphic’).
You’d think that the pronunciation choice of the creator would carry some weight but instead many people objected loudly (using hard consonants presumably).
Office-Watch.com wondered what Microsoft Office thought the pronunciation should be. That’s not an entirely silly question. ‘Gif’ isn’t a normal English word so the ‘text to speech’ feature in Office could speak it either way.
We fired up Word 2013 on Windows 8 with US language settings and heard is say the sentence “This is a GIF image.”
The result? A soft g is spoken just like the US peanut butter brand.
Next we tried Mr Wilhite’s short acceptance speech “It’s Pronounced ‘JIF’ not ‘GIF.”
– Word pronounces both ‘JIF’ and ‘GIF’ the same way.
