Gigabyte

How do you pronounce “gigabyte”? And “.gif”?

I always use a hard ‘g’ sound, “ghigabyte”, but a very intelligent co-worker consistently uses a ‘j’ sound, “jigabyte”. It turns out most dictionaries list the pronunciation of “gigabyte” like “jigabyte”, some of them listing both as acceptable. So what’s the answer?

I’ve always thought it unfortunate when people name things after things that are problematic like this. Like Gigabeat. It’s not clear how to “correctly” pronounce the name of the company.

And there’s this musical group from Stanford calling themselves “Occam’s Razor”. Prof. Koller strongly insists that the “correct” spelling is “Ockham”. Strongly. But yeah, the group’s name might be a misspelling. How unfortunate.

When I form my band, I’m sticking to simple letters and numbers. Like U2. Or V8.