Comments on: ‘SQL’ is not pronounced ‘sequel’ ! Where the hell did those vowells come from?

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:25:15 +0000

Words like DVD are pronounced using the letters because they already include the vowel sounds. “Dee-vee-dee”.

Worlds like SQL do not and so “Ess-qyou-ehl” don’t roll off the tongue quite the same as “See-qwell”.

It’s not just acronyms that are pronounced differently by different people — there’s a whole slew of them (tomato, potato, roof, Linux).

In the end you just come off sounding like a douchebag for even complaining about it in the first place. So my suggestion to you is take your nickers off and remove the knot.

By: cory

cory — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:38:22 +0000

My biggest annoyance is when people say GUI as Goowy. I don’t care what they think when they say it, but it makes them look retarded and/or buzzword-dropping.
Also when people say things like “I dropped shell and …”. No, you opened the damn terminal (or switched to a TTY via ALT+F1, etc.)
SQL is a bad one as well, I don’t like it and hear people use it all the time. That’s like trying to pronounce PHP as Pfffp.
I can see it now “Yeah, I have mad Pfffp skillz!” …. only to get the response “You’re a poofer? Well, buddy, your sexual orientation is none of my business.”
/rant — sorry

By: Jorophose

Jorophose — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:06:56 +0000

Hey Bert! Not sure if this is the proper place to put this, but a while back you were asking about VIA’s quad-core monster… Well it seems they didn’t release it, or at least nobody has it anymore. I did find the VT310-DP though, the dual-socket version.

SQL is probably one of the weirdest acronyms to say… Normally you want to go “Sequel” or “Squewl”. Pronouncing PostgreSQL is a nightmare.

By: Sahmeepee

Sahmeepee — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:59:43 +0000

Technically, by calling SQL an acronym you are implicitly endorsing the “sequel” pronunciation. Acronyms are pronounced as words; initialisms are pronounced as letters (see linked uri).

I have no strong preference for either version, although I probably use “sequel” more often. There’s also a strong tendency to use “sequel” when saying “Microsoft SQL Server”.

By: NSK

NSK — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:59:01 +0000

There was an IBM language long time ago named SEQUEL and made by Chamberlin and Boyce, IIRC, so perhaps people say sequel for historical reasons. I prefer the S-Q-L pronunciation, though.