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Comment by dylanfw | Hacker News Reader

Seeing "LaTeX" (lay-tech) and "arXiv" together in your sentence made me finally realize that arXiv is pronounced "archive". I've been reading it as "arx-iv" for years.

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It's really not pronounced "lay-tecks"? Damn, I've been pronouncing that incorrectly for years, then.

LaTeX: /ˈlɑːtɛx/ LAH-tekh, also pronounced as /ˈlɑːtɛk/ LAH-tek or /ˈleɪtɛk/ LAY-tek

Knuth, in his book, memorably decreed a pronunciation (and case mixing in the written form) for TeX, with a hard /ch/ at the end (literally, "your monitor should become slightly moist"), backed by a clever and erudite rationale involving the etymology of words like technique.

Leslie Lamport, in his book on LaTeX, decreed a case mixing, but (as you say) ok'd any reasonable pronunciation.

Originally, a TeX user would've been called a TeXnician, which, according to Don Knuth, would be pronounced the same as "technician."

Yes- it comes from the same root.

I guess we're in the same boat on that one. It's a weird pronunciation, though, so it barely counts against us. ;)

Archive is spelled "arkiv" in several languages, and the etymology goes back (via latin) to the Greek ἀρχεῖον (arkheîon), so it's a quite clever name.

Where "clever" is a synonym for "needlessly unintuitive." Not that I'm complaining.

Took me a long time to figure out that NGINX is not supposed to be spelled out.

> I've been reading it as "arx-iv" for years.

Same. You've blown my mind!

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