What’s the right way to pronounce ‘gif’?

The man who invented gifs, Stephen Wilhite, has died, aged 74. Controversy survives him – over how to pronounce the thing.

A gif was a format that, from 1987, allowed graphics to be shared by otherwise incompatible computers. The name came from the initials of Graphics Interchange Format. That was not decisive, for the word could be pronounced as jif if it followed common words like gin, or as gif like gig.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

There’s no way of telling the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word beginning gi-. There are, it is true, six or seven words gig, all pronounced with a hard g. The gig economy derives from the gig performed by musicians (a term of unknown origin), but there is also a gig that is a spinning top, which might give its meaning to gig ‘a giddy girl’ and to the gig who is a ‘queer-looking figure’ as the dictionary puts it.