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Comment by bch | Hacker News Reader

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bch·

I was most excited to learn that ed(1) is pronounced “eee dee”.

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... by literally four people.

What's right is right, even if the majority is wrong. No argumentum ad populum here! :-)

... who literally created it.

... please repeat after me: gif.

I generally go with “GIF with a soft G is the format, GIF with a hard G is the culture.”

Everyone involved in the creation of GIF and CompuShow pronounce it as "jif". Anything else is sacrelige.

Those people aren’t part of the lifestyle or culture. I wish they were.

CompuServe.

CompuShow was the DOS GIF viewer.

D’oh. Thanks.

Stands to reason really. cd, ls, mv (crush the “move” heresy), ld, and others. Ambiguity creeps in at three characters. Who’s the man?

From the video [1]:

"The UNIX text editor was called 'eee-dee' - it's not pronounced 'ed', at least by those in the know - it's pronounced 'eee-dee'. This was written by Ken Thompson, and I think it was basically a stripped down version of an editor called QED"

[1] https://youtu.be/NTfOnGZUZDk?t=113

Those lack the vowels to be pronounceable. Also ed looks like the first syllable of editor and could reasonable be pronounced as such.

You're not wrong, but it's still pretty clear that the PDP11 crew thought in keystrokes and not syllables.

"ed" (and the ED in QED)'s name was also chosen as an abbreviation for "editor". But the creators chose to pronounce the abbreviation differently.

The octal dumper od is pronounced oh-dee, the assembler is ay-ess, the archiver is ay-arr. OTOH, the delayed execution command is “at”, but that is a full word anyway.

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