Apr
3
Our First Social Experiment – giforgif.com
Posted by Trent in Uncategorized
Our office is split down the middle when it comes to the pronunciation of the file format “gif”.
Is it “GIF” with a hard “G” or is it “JIF” (like the peanut butter)?
We decided to pose this question to the masses by creating a simple website giforgif.com and post it at http://digg.com/d1nuRW.
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 pm
This rocks. You know what I want to know? What’s the gender breakdown for gif vs. jif. Something tells me that men are going to lean towards gif, while women are going to go the other way. Great work; have fun with this.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:45 am
I pronounce it “gif” with a hard G. The people that pronounce it “jif” are definitely the softies. They need to toughen up and pronounce it like a hard G on steroids.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
There is only one proper way to pronounce this acronym and it’s JIF.
CompuServe used to distribute a graphics display program called CompuShow. In the documentation for version 8.33 in the FAQ section, it clearly states:
“The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), pronounced ‘JIF’, was designed by CompuServe and the official specification released in June of 1987.”
If you insist on pronouncing it differently than the developers originally intended go ahead. You’ll only sound like a layman to those who are experts on all things Internet.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Its a hard ‘G’ sound ‘cos it stands for Graphic Interchange Format.
We dont pronounce ‘graphic’ with a J sound!
April 17th, 2009 at 6:59 am
It is in fact pronounced like “JIFF”.
The Graphic Interchange Format was a trademark of Compuserve 10+ years ago.
I worked at Compuserve and we pronounced it “JIFF” internally.
You own it.. you can pronounce it how you want right?