An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

As everyone knows, GIF stands for "Giraffe Interchange Format". Hence the pronunciation. Demonstration: <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gif" rel="nofollow">http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gi...</a>

Reminds me of this page: <a href="http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/" rel="nofollow">http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/</a><p>Which has, conservatively, been around forever<p>&#62;I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a historically popular peanut butter commercial).

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin. Of course I'm sure the creator of the PNG format would say it's pronounced "pong". At least <i>that</i> would make sense. The whole jiff joke was never, ever funny.<p>The reason people use a hard G is because that's what makes sense given the wording of the acronym. Unless I've been pronouncing "graphics" wrong this whole time?

I don't care what the creator of the format says. I'm using the hard g.

I use GIF pronunciation to tell how long someone has been on the Internet and precursors of the Internet. I got my first modem (300 baud Mitey Mo) in 1985 and I've seen this story come up at least 50 times since then.<p>If you've been on the Internet over 15 years then this will not be news to you. The other thing I find interesting about the GIF format is how everyone assumes it was designed for animation. I saw someone on reddit "knowingly" tell another redditor "oh yeah there can be non animated GIFs they just consist of a single frame of animation."

The 'G' sound in the word 'G-raphics' (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) makes more sense to carry over to the acronym. I think the boats understandably sailed Mr.White!

The creators of SCSI wanted it to be pronounced ‘sexy’ (SeCSI). Tough luck.

Don't talk bad about GIF! GIF is a great format. Once upon a time I wrote a GIF89a library that supported animation, etc. I found it straightforward to parse and write, eminently extensible, with a clear and easy-to-read specification.<p>No one has been able to get their act together and propose a successful PNG animation format, but I'm disappointed that the "PNG in GIF" proposal never took off. Size wouldn't be so bad since most images would share a global color space, and browser makers could easily implement it.<p>ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/png-group/documents/history/png-in-gif-proposal-20070413.txt

I personally don't care which pronunciation you use. As long you understand it's 'gib', not 'jib' when you blow somebody into pieces.<p>/me ducks

GIF will be around until there is another animated image format with decent support. APNG seems nice, but needs to be supported more. Personally, I like GIF. It's simple and can be included everywhere with a simple img tag. It's possible to animate with CSS, Javascript or video, but that's a lot more hassle and cannot be done in a comment box.

Perhaps this will help: <a href="http://howdoyoupronouncegif.com" rel="nofollow">http://howdoyoupronouncegif.com</a>

If you want to be well liked, don't ever be the person who directly corrects other's pronunciation of words.

I'd let a machine decide.<p><a href="http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%20or%20jif...%0AGif%20or%20Jif...%0A%0A%22.gif%22%20or%20%22.jif%22.." rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%2...</a>.<p>Google's Text-to-Speech seems to pronounce it with a Soft G.

It's pronounced "bikeshed".

"that's Frahn-ken-steen."

And it's "Amerigo," according to Vespucci.

I used to say "Ihm-grr" (imgur.com) instead of "Ihm-jer" so I guess I can learn to say "Jiff."

I used to pronounce it incorrectly, but my friend who built the NSFW site theworstdrug.com, which lets you click through the most popular GIFs on tumblr (hint they are all porn) enlightened me

The only thing pronounced is how aged and antiquated the format is.

GIF, JPEG, PNG,... all these are not English words, so multiply possible pronunciations by a hundred (every Dutch speaking person I know pronounces them the Dutch way).

'jif'? what!? <a href="http://qkme.me/3uig7w" rel="nofollow">http://qkme.me/3uig7w</a>

The dancing baby that started it all... I can't believe that was 17 years ago...

As if they chose that stupid derivative yahoo GIF to headline this.