How to Pronounce "GIF"

Overview

A lot has been written over the years about how to pronounce "GIF"—whether with a "hard" "g" ([g] as in "gift"): [gɪf], or with a "soft" "g" ([ʤ] as in "gin"): [ʤɪf]. Unfortunately, a lot of the arguments are unoriginal and stupid—often both at once, and this from both sides, alike!

TL;DR: What seems to be established is that the inventor (or inventors) of GIF pronounced it [ʤɪf], whereas any reasonable a-priori pronunciation would have it be [gɪf]. In modern Linguistics, there is no such thing as an officially "correct" or "incorrect" pronunciation, so the choice of which to use is not a matter of correctness, and must ultimately be made individually.

To some extent, your decision reflects your values. Do you favor the 1980s in-joke and hacker culture? Or regular pronunciation and common-sense? It's not exactly an easy choice, unfortunately.

Early History of GIF

The early history of GIF is highly relevant here, but has unfortunately been somewhat distorted by those who want to argue one way or the other about the pronunciation.

As far as I can tell, "CompuServe Information Service" ("CIS", also just "CompuServe") was an online service provider (similar to, but not quite the same as, a modern ISP). Alexander "Sandy" Trevor, then CTO of CompuServe, wanted a graphics format that was (1) portable and (2) had a small file size, and tasked employee Steve Wilhite with creating one. In "early 1986", Wilhite started work on GIF, and finished the first version in May 1987. The first version of GIF, "87a" was publicly released on June 15, 1987.

GIF turned out to infringe on a patented compression algorithm (which is now expired), apparently motivating the creation of PNG and a boycott of GIFs. However, today, GIF continues to enjoy widespread support and use (for better or worse).

Opinions of the Inventor(s) of GIF

In May 2013, Wilhite won a Webby Award, using the occasion to claim that he invented GIF and that his favored pronunciation was [ʤɪf]. This prompted immediate and widespread backlash on the internet, prettymuch igniting the modern debate.

It is unclear whether Wilhite worked alone or with a team—that is, whether GIF had one "inventor" or many. My guess is that Wilhite worked alone initially and, once it was sortof working, it was iterated upon by CompuServe employees before the initial public release—thus making the line a little blurry but Wilhite's claim fair. I suppose the "inventor" could also be fairly deemed to be CompuServe as a whole. Regardless, from anecdotes about the time period, it seems that "GIF" was indeed widely pronounced among CompuServe employees as [ʤɪf].

This pronunciation was almost certainly intended as a joke, and alludes to contemporary Jif peanut butter commercials (for what it's worth, while Jif has been a remarkably good sport about the whole thing, it has come down on the side of hard "g"[1]). It has been observed, in fact, that this is absolutely the sort of cheesy pun a coder would make, especially at the time.

It is also not clear that the FAQ document for CompuShow (next subsection) and whatever Steve Wilhite claims really represent the serious consensus today of all the people involved in the development of GIF—albeit what can be pieced together seems to indicate that it does.

So it seems that the argument that the "inventor pronounces it 'JIF'" does seem to hold water—regardless of how big or small "inventor" is taken to be.

The CompuShow FAQ

A primary example, and one of the few textual, of the [ʤɪf] pronunciation can be found in the contemporary "CompuShow" software (also known as "cshow", for its command-line invocation): an early shareware image viewer, from CompuServe, evidently for Windows DOS (and later, other systems).

CompuShow is widely cited in the debate because the full distribution contained a document ("Q&A.DOC") that opened with the following (formatting original):

  The GIF (Graphics  Interchange Format),  pronounced "JIF",  was designed  by
  CompuServe and the official  specification released in  June of 1987.  Since
  that time, it has become very popular, due to several factors.

It must be noted that this document seems to be due to a one Bob Berry: also apparently a CompuServe employee, but not, at least, the primary "inventor" of GIF per-se.

Language Usage

Language reflects usage. Lexicography (roughly, the study of words) is descriptive, not prescriptive. Hard "g" [gɪf] is, in this sense, indisputably a word because it is very very widely used.

In fact, it seems that [gɪf] was the overwhelmingly dominant public pronunciation for a very long time—and perhaps still is. A contemporary image format FAQ remarked that "most people seem to prefer" [gɪf] (and, anecdotally, this is the version I myself remember, exclusively).

In naming "GIF" the OED's 2012 Word of the Year for the USA, the editors wrote:

The programmers who developed the format preferred a pronunciation with a soft g (in homage to the commercial tagline of the peanut butter brand Jif, they supposedly quipped “choosy developers choose GIF”). However, the pronunciation with a hard g is now very widespread and readily understood.

. . . a quotation which was further intensified by Chief Editor of the OED John Simpson:

A coiner effectively loses control of a word once it’s out there; for instance, the coiner of quark in the physics sense had intended it to rhyme with cork, but general usage has resulted in it rhyming with mark.

It seems the [gɪf] was—and perhaps still is—the dominant pronunciation of "GIF". This alone makes it "valid".

Phonetics

A giraffe.

Figure 1

: A giraffe. (Image source, Wikipedia.)

In English orthography, "g" more often than not represents a hard "g" [g] sound. There are exceptions, but the majority of words have a hard "g": words like "get", "git", "god", "good", "guess", "grievance", "Gettysburg", "green", etc. The exceptions are relatively recent additions from other languages: words like "gem" (French), "gin" (Dutch, French), "gesture" (Church Latin), etc. In some sense, words with a hard "g" are more "fundamentally English".

Taken as a word, the word "GIF" should therefore be pronounced [gɪf].

Of course, "GIF" is also an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format. "Graphics" comes to English from ancient Greek via ancient Latin. It's a very English word, and it happens that everyone agrees how to pronounce it—with a hard "g". Pronouncing "GIF" like "JIF" is sort of like saying you're saving your images in the "giraffe-ics interchange format"—which is of course asinine.

While the pronunciation [gɪf] as a word is fairly indisputable, a counterargument to the pronunciation as an acronym is that acronyms in fact do not have to follow the pronunciation of their words. A directly relevant example is "JPEG", an acronym for "Joint Photographic Experts Group", which is universally pronounced [ˈʤeɪ.pɛɡ] ("JAY-peg"). If acronyms followed their source words, it would be [ˈʤeɪ.fɛɡ] ("JAY-feg") or possibly [ˈʤʌ.fɛɡ] ("JUH-feg"). Whether this argument is true, or whether it suggests that "JPEG" is also mispronounced, is an exercise for the reader's perspective.

Conclusion

Current popular usage is divided between [ʤɪf] and [gɪf]. The official story per the current internet is basically that [ʤɪf] is the one true pronunciation and that [gɪf] is wrong. However, this take is flatly incorrect. While the inventor(s) of GIF apparently did pronounce it [ʤɪf], and advocate that usage, the pronunciation [gɪf] is just as linguistically valid—and additionally makes far more phonetic and etymological sense.

The (unfortunate, IMO) truth is that there is no "right" or "wrong" here. Prescriptivist linguistics offers no preference between the more-popular [gɪf] and the "original" [ʤɪf]—but linguistic prescriptivism is obsolete anyway (largely as a reaction to its (ab)use in disenfranchising minorities the early 20th century, but the point stands: telling someone they are "right" or "wrong" about their language is a no-go).

You ask me, what somebody declared 30 years ago about a file format should not be taken as divine law. Especially when they were referencing peanut butter. It's a dumb joke, though by acknowledging it you respect the achievement in creating such an enduring format.

Do what you like.

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Notes

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