7 Internet Words You’ve Been Mispronouncing Like “GIF”

Though it has been long debated, the correct pronunciation of the GIF can no longer be questioned. It is well documented that the father of the GIF, Steve Wilhite,pronounces it as Jiff with a soft G, not a hard G.

Mind blowing,

I know. It’s going to take some adjusting. You might even want to practice it in front of your mirror for a while. Now, I don’t want to overwhelm you, but we here at Slacktory have uncovered a few more words that we have all been mispronouncing.

Internet: Did you know it is pronounced Eye-nternet, not Enter-net? This makes a lot of sense because the Internet is something you look at with your eyes, not enter with your body.

Wi-Fi: While everyone thinks Wi-Fi is pronounced Why-Fy, it is actually pronounced wiffy. This is derived from the fact that most Wi-Fi hotspots are pretty iffy.

Meme: Internet elitists will try to claim this word is pronounced meem, like the word gene. The truth is the word is pronounced Memmay, because it sounds French and is just funnier.

URL: Most people will spell out this word saying U R L. Truth is it should be pronounced Earl, after the founder of Unified Resource Locations, Url Webbington III.

Vlogging: It is commonly believed that Vlogging is a variation of blogging, and is therefore pronounced the same way. But vlogging was originally used to describe the logging of many Vs, an abbreviation of videos. The correct pronunciation is Vee-Logging.

IP address: It’s not eye pee address, as we all so vulgarly say. It’s pronounced Ip and was named after the famous martial artist Ip Man. Fun fact: the very first IP address contains the birthdate, weight, and favorite numbers of Ip Man.

LOL: Perhaps the most used and therefore the most mispronounced word in the eye-nternet vernacular. LOL is not to be spelled out or pronounced “lawl” or “lowell”. It is pronounced as “Unnnhhh-ninininini” with the “Unnnhhh” real low and guttural and the “ninininini” like a high trill — as begrudgingly and maliciously ratified in a 1989 Usenet thread by users who had long since rejected spoken language.