How to Pronounce Nvidia, Huawei, Bezos and Other Tech Terms

At the risk of relitigating the long-running debate on whether web graphic term GIF should be pronounced "Jif" or "Gif" (with a hard G), we will say that more than 99% of the time, there's a correct way to pronounce names in the tech industry, and you probably aren't always getting them right.

Sure, Tesla, AI, internet, Wi-Fi, Android, Zuckerberg -- these are agreed upon and hard to get wrong. But what about names of people, companies and products you see all the time but maybe never bothered to get the exact pronunciation on, like Huawei or Ubisoft?

Does Jeff Bezos pronounce his own name "Bee-zos," evoking worker bees in hexagonal warehouses, "Bay-zos" like Baywatch, or "Bezz-os" like the first part rhymes with PEZ candy? You're not so sure anymore, are you? We got you off balance!

Here, then, is a starter list of a dozen terms and how they are pronounced.

iOS: The easiest of the bunch, right? It's simply saying the three characters separately, "Eye," "Oh" and "Ess." Apple backs this up every time people like CEO Tim Cook mention the operating system in every Apple Event. Still, some people persist in saying "Eye-Ohs" or "Eye-Oss" as if the O and S are not separate syllables.

Nvidia: This one seems simple but is easy to get wrong. Is it "EN-vi-dee-uh" or "IN-vid-ee-uh?" CEO Jensen Huang calls his company "In-vidia" when he says "God, I love Nvidia!" 15 minutes into this keynote video, so we're going to go with that.

Jeff Bezos: The Washington Post settled this in 2013 with a video from the Amazon founder himself. It's "BAY-zos." You're on your own with "Jeff."

Claude: Is Anthropic's AI model pronounced "clod" like "prod" or "cloud," as in the place you put files you never to see again? The answer is somewhere in the middle, with the company's CEO Dario Amodei stretching out the vowels in a CNBC interview to make it sound more like "clawed," as in what might happen to a lucky toy in a Claw machine. 

Huawei: The Chinese tech manufacturer's name is usually pronounced "WAH-way," but if you really want to make it sound like the way CEO Ren Zhengfei says it, you need to throw a little H-sound at the top but keep it to two syllables: "HWAH-way."

SQL: The initialism for Structured Query Language, synonymous with databases, should be pronounced like the three letters: "Ess" "Cue" and "Ell." But many insist on referring to it with acronym pronunciation of "sequel," even though there's no 2 in it. 

Balatro: We love this addictive card game, but not everyone who plays it knows that the name comes from the Latin term for jester. Polygon went so far as to ask the developer of the game how to pronounce the title. Spoiler: They didn't actually know. The Latin pronunciation: "BAH-lah-trow" is correct.

Sundar Pichai: The CEO of Alphabet's name is easy with the help of Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Kemlani. In a TikTok video, she breaks it down: "SOON-dir PITCH-eye."

Ubisoft: CEO Yves Guillemot calls the video game company "YOO-bee-soft," not "Oo-bee-soft" 

Stochastic parrot: This term has become more common as it relates to AI. It refers to language models that don't understand the meaning behind the language they're using, much like a parrot. The first word has a hard "K" sound and is pronounced "STUH-kass-tick," and rhymes with "sarcastic."

X Æ A-12: The name of the first child of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and musician Grimes is pronounced "EX-ash-ay-twelve," according to Musk himself on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and confirmed by Grimes on social media. Grimes and Musk have two more children together, and Musk himself has at least 12 children.

GIF: Fine, you got us on this one, an acronym for graphics interchange format. The creator of the format, Steve Wilhite, said it's "Jif" like the peanut butter, but people persist in using a hard G instead after decades of debate. We say choose your own on this one, everyone will know what you mean in the proper context.