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.
Wow, I never knew people thought it was pronounced differently. Never even considered it looked like jinx.
Rules of English, the closest I’d come is n-jinx. You don’t pronounce letters individually, unless reciting the alphabet or something.
Unless you pronounce the letter “B” the same way you say it, like the bug that makes honey.
We don’t say “beenefits” or “bee eee an eee eef eye tee ess”
Well you see, this is software so the rules break down here in favor of cool. I guess I just grew up surrounded by naming conventions like that so could easily identify it.
Why would I pronounce something with rules of English that’s not an English word? When I say the word jalapeno, I pronounce the tilde on the n even though in English it’s neither written with the tilde nor written with a letter combination that would produce that sound through standard English spelling.
Yeah lots of people don’t realize that 1. English rules don’t matter a majority of the time, 2. English has a lot of loan words that people mispronounce, not just mispronounce from the perspective of the owning language but from an English rules perspective as well, and 3. Proper nouns don’t give a shit about anything. GIF is a proper noun, created and owned by a company. They get to call it whatever they want and the rules of the language don’t matter. I
that’s not how most people do though, a lot of people will nativize words to the language they’re speaking or are most used to. Like with your example of “jalapeno” that’s… one of the more famous words for people to pronounce in wild ways, there’s a video of a swedish guy who manages to turn it into “japaleno” because that’s more compatible with swedish.