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TIL that "nginx" is pronounced "engine-x", and not "n-jinx" (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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nginx ("engine x") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server. […] [1]

I still pronounce it as "n-jinx" in my head.

References

Title (website): "nginx". Publisher: NGINX. Accessed: 2025-02-26T23:25Z. URI: https://nginx.org/en/.
- §"nginx". ¶1.

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[–] JohnnyCanuck 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (7 children)

It doesn't matter what it stands for. That's not how acronyms work.

You don't say "yolwa" for "YOLO"
You don't say "Ah-ih-dees" for "AIDS"
You don't say "britches" for "BRICS"
You don't say "sue-knee" for "CUNY" (City University of New York) Etc.

And if you want to argue specifically about G:
You don't say "Jad" for "GAD" (generalized anxiety disorder)
You don't say "joes" for "GOES" (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)

It's not a hill I'm going to die on, I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I've ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it "jif". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation

Now let's talk about "gibs" you heathens.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (4 children)

SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.

And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

People forget in the 90s/00s both GIF and JIF were relatively common image file types. It was only logical to use the hard G for GIF. So that's how we used it. This overrules all arguments of how acronyms work or what the creator originally called it.

[–] JohnnyCanuck 2 points 4 days ago

Bah, I was there. .jif was barely used and came 5 years after. They should have used a different name!

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