Is it pronounced “giff” or “jiff”? According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF image file format, “choosy developers choose JIF.” If you recognize this tagline as a riff on a famous peanut butter brand slogan (“Choosy moms choose Jif”), you know the intended pronunciation is with a soft “G,” like in “giant” or “gym.”
Wilhite doubled down on this pronunciation at the 2013 Webby Awards, displaying a massive GIF while accepting his award. The short animation plainly stated, “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’ NOT ‘GIF.’” So, if the creator promotes this pronunciation, that should resolve the dispute, right? Not so fast. According to a Stack Overflow survey, 65% of respondents use a hard “G” (as in “gum”) — the “wrong” pronunciation.
A GIF, short for “graphics interchange format,” is a type of looping animation created by Wilhite in 1987. GIFs are widely used today in marketing, entertainment, and texting, but despite their ubiquity, there’s still much debate over the pronunciation of their name. Even with Wilhite’s proclamation, the question persists: Should it be pronounced with a hard “G” as in “gift” or a soft “G” as in “gem”? The short answer is that both are technically acceptable, according to Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary. (Remember: While we look to dictionaries as the arbiter of truth for language queries, they record how people use language, but they don’t necessarily make up the rules.)
The argument for the hard “G” is fueled by what the “G” stands for: “graphics.” For some, this is a dead giveaway and the reason for the discourse. However, no rules state that acronyms must be pronounced correspondingly to their full names. Take GEICO, or “Government Employees Insurance Company.” In this acronym, the “E” is pronounced with the “I” to form an /aɪ/ sound, like in “height,” while in “employees,” the “E” creates an /e/ sound, as in “edit.”
In 2020, in a humorous attempt to settle the GIF/JIF dispute, Jif partnered with GIPHY (an online GIF database) to release limited-edition jars of peanut butter with labels reading “Gif.” However, both pronunciations persist, leaving us to wonder what the next amusing chapter will be in this ongoing debate.
