Ok, but the J stands for "Google"
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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The J stand for Giraffes.
How does it feel to have the objectively best sense of humor?
Okay so Jif for shorthand and Joojif for the full spelling. Just to make a call to their original misspelling of Googol
May I suggest 'Jiggle'?
Are you pronouncing it Giggle like you jiggle when you laugh? A chunky happy baby is a great marketing foundation. Just make some Jiggles of babies
You'll never end the debate about how to pronounce Gif. Homophones exist. There's a pronunciation guide in the original documentation, and that didn't end the debate.
Homophonia is a huge issue
Have coarse wee dew knot wont two bee band buy Maudes fore braking roules.
I hate how fluently I could read that
Jraphics Interchange Format
Self-Contained Uoonderwater Breathing Apparatus
Light Aimplification by Ztimulated Uhmission of Radiation
Acronyms do not work that way! It isn't a thing. You're talking nonsense.
Sure, but for consistency you also have to pronounce JPEG as "jay-feg".
G on it's own can do hard or soft sounds. P needs the H to do the F.
... which further strengthens the underlying point that acronyms don't need to be pronounced like the words they represent.
I actually do.
There’s a pronunciation guide in the original documentation, and that didn’t end the debate.
Humans are even more horrible that this first glance suggests. Imagine, one day, the debate truly ends and a single pronunciation for GIF is universally established and recognized by everyone. A group of humans will start to intentionally mispronounce it (or misspell it) just for the aggravation it will generate in others or for their own amusement.
This is where the meme-like behavior of deliberately misspelling the popular phrase (at the time) "all correct" as "oll korrect". This was later abbreviated as "o.k." and then eventually "ok". A phrase we likely use dozens or hundreds of times a day is meme-speak from 1839. source
Thanks for that link, I've long wondered the origin of OK!
There's a pronunciation guide in the original documentation
And it was WRONG
There is no wrong. English doesn't have wrong pronunciations. You're either understood or you aren't. There's the original pronunciation, and there's the new pronunciation. Both are used, so neither is wrong.
Agree
But also. Jif is wrong.
You're welcome to pronounce any word any way you like. I'm not going to change the way I've been saying a word for 30 years just because you don't like it. If you're understood, it's all good.
So what you’re saying is that just like articles—THEY DIDN'T READ. Then they perpetuated fake news until it was accepted by half the audience.
More than half. Less than 25% of people use the original pronunciation of gif, and two people in this thread have repeated the absurd misconceptions that popularized the new pronunciation.
Well, I like peanut butter and that’s how it’s pronounced. I guess I’m part of the quarter gang.
There's dozens of us! I'm just old enough to remember when the file format was new and people talked about it.
There is no debate. It's pronounced GIF with a hard G.
Graphics Interchange Format
Anyone who says "jif" is just a moron who probably also says "reesees peesees"
Or it's the inventor of GIF.
Yeah, but what does he know?
Anyway what is aJif anyway, it sounds like soap.
When it was a thing way back when, everyone pronounced it with a soft G
what does that mean ?
That's not an argument. You're just being insulting and belligerent. Acronyms are not pronounced based on their constituent words. You need to let that go, because it makes you the asshole.
There are two factors that determine how words are pronounced in English, and this is precisely true of every fucking word in the language. There's the original pronunciation, and then there's common usage. If English borrows a word from another language, like "bruschetta," there's the original pronunciation "brooskett" and then there's the American pronunciation "brooshetta" because fuck all that. Say either one and you'll be understood, and you'll have spoken English. Neither is "wrong" because people know you want some expensive salsa on tiny toast.
It's the same with gif. There was the original pronunciation, and then basically nobody said the word out loud for 20 years because only nerds cared about the extension format wars. Then the internet brought memes to your grandmother, and suddenly everyone was sharing dancing_baby.gif and hardly anyone knew how to say it. People actively avoided saying the word because they didn't want to sound stupid.
Then one day, some extra stupid people decided that they had enough of that bullshit, and they would not be made to feel stupid for not knowing how to pronounce a word. They shouldn't have felt stupid, because again, English doesn't work that way, but at that time the nerds were strutting around like they had invented confidence. Technical pronunciations were like a geek shibboleth that signaled you had in fact RTFM, and because pendulums swing, techies were bullying people online about it.
But I did call them stupid people, because they were stupid. Not because they didn't know how to pronounce a word, but because they chose obstinate ignorance over truth. There was a common, original pronunciation for gif, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. The fact that graphics is pronounced with a hard g doesn't matter in the slightest, because that's not a rule that ever existed before someone got mad about gifs. The only thing worse than a shitbag who bullies you for being wrong about something is a shitbag who bullies you for being right about something.
Talk how you like. This is, for now, a free world. English evolves, and life is too short to spend your days arguing with an amateur linguist online, because this guy has two thumbs and will absolutely continue this conversation until you regret engaging in it. Be free. Your hard on for the hard g is a stone you carry around for no one, and all you have to do is set it down.
Jif already exists as a filetype (at least it did long ago...)
Only if they claimed it would as Spanish language inspired and insisted it was pronounced hif
More like heef if we were using spanish pronunciation.
I prefer the German style
GIF is way too short to be German.
Hint: the German J makes an English "Y" sound.
Pretty sure that JIF is already trademarked and copyrighted by the peanutbutter brand.
That would just mean you couldn't use the graphic format for pictures of peanut butter. It should be fine for everything else.
They should’ve called it JPG to settle JPG vs JPEG
Well now I feel like an idiot because I thought they were actually two different file types with some stupid rule like how many pixels they could display. 😂
I had to look it up and find out it changed because of operating systems and what they could handle for naming conventions.