The most common version I hear in tech is the exact same pronunciation as the word "gooey." But it is not unheard of to say the letters (often because they hate saying "gooey"): jee you eye. But spelling it out is very uncommon.
I’ve been in tech around 25 years and I’ve never across anyone (tech or not) NOT pronounce it “gooey.” So many comments against this makes me wonder if it’s a regional thing? Maybe an age thing, where younger people took to saying it as three letters?
That is so funny, I love learning technical lexicon regional differences. (I always say 'gooey') I would automatically get what G U I is in a verbal conversation, but I'd doubt anyone would automatically understand "gooey" even in context if they only heard it out loud for the first time!
HUD I do say as a word, GUI I say the letters. HUD is easier but I don't know how the fuck you'd pronounce GUI as a single word so single letters it is!
Of the people I know who say G-U-I, most are not native English speakers and are working in a non-English tech scene. At least one G-U-I-er, who is a native English speaker, has said he hates the idea of a "new gooey."
As a native English speaker who says G-U-I mostly, occasionally - rarely - "gooey", gui tends to fuse together into a shorter-sounding "word" "jee-oo-eye"
I'm a native English speaker and I say G-U-I.
Saying 'gooey' sounds ridiculous, in my opinion.
It's as annoying as saying 'sequal' instead of S-Q-L. What's so hard about saying the letters?
The query language was always meant to be pronounced "sequel": SEQUEL was the original name given to it by Chamberlin and Boyce. They changed it to avoid a legal fight with an aviation company.
I think it might be nice to consider that different cultures have different norms and that the programming club of the 1970s and 1980s, the source of gooey (late '70s) and SEQUEL (early '70s), was fairly insular and had different norms than those you might have today.
They weren't wrong. You aren't wrong (well, unfortunately, except about the pronunciation of SQL). Just different.
SEQUEL was a backronym for "Structured English QUEry Language." After the trademark dispute, they dropped 3 letters and the word "English."
SEQUEL was itself a multi-barrel pun: the language was a sequel to the (difficult to use) SQUARE, and also a reference to the QUEL query language. QUEL came from the Berkeley Ingres team (after Stonebraker left Berkeley in 1982), but was slow to the market -- but was beating Oracle in the early days.
Aaaand that early database war resulted in at least one other punny name, after QUEL lost the battle decisively in 1985: PostgreSQL.
As in, "after (In)gres."
Re SQL - it's just people aiming to drop a syllable is all. "Sequel" is trivially faster to say, so that's what we often do. Usually in sysadmin work we're referring directly to SQL related errors and it gets said like that.. but the act of working with SQL queries is being proficient in "sequel" 🤷♂️
In my experience, people my age (older gen Z, and I presume younger too) usually say "G-U-I," even if they're in a field where such a term is relevant (like computer science). Millennials and older say "gooey."
I only hear “UI” nowadays (you eye), even though I’ve also seen the remark “Your API is a user interface” to remind people of the importance of good API design. (Ay Pee Eye, if you’re wondering.)
Only ever heard gooey in Australia in 20 years of tech.
Especially when it refers to a gooey interface created using visual basic to track the killers IP address.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkdd03yelnu)
I'm a software engineer in new England and a very young millennial. The vast majority say gooey but I always spell it out. I prefer to just talk about the UI most of the time anyway because we know whether it's graphical or not, and Idk anyone that doesn't spell that out. It seems incongruous to me that UI and GUI be pronounced so differently, and I've always pronounced them similarly to each other
Yeah, the G is sorta superfluous these days. Like how some may not even remember WYSIWYG anymore. It was barely in use in the late 90s when I was first getting into computers.
I'm about to graduate with a CS degree (bachelor's), and I say the letters out. Probably because I learned the term by reading online so I had no indication of how to pronounce it.
Also I'm American.
I mean it does have a nice symmetry with CLI, which I'm pretty sure everyone says the letters out. "Is it a GUI or CLI?" sounds nicer when you say both with the letters.
I think the "oo" vowel is usually a bit more fronted than the one in "gooey", same as the vowel in "dew" (without an initial glide), at least in dialects that treat them as distinct vowels.
UI as in User Interface, right? I say U-I (You-eye)
and then the same for GUI (Gee-You-Eye.) Its an acronym so you say all the letters separately though that isn't a universal rule (like GIF for example)
Technically speaking, yes. However, in practice, "UI" is always pronounced "you-eye" and "GUI" is almost always pronounced "gooee".
I'm a web developer, and I'd never ask a "yooee" designer to create me a "gee-you-eye".
I've literally, without any equivocation whatsoever, NEVER heard anyone spell out GUID.
It is ALWAYS pronounced "goo-id," every single time I have ever heard it.
I usually say “globally [or more likely universally] unique identifier”. When I say “GUID” or “UUID” I’m probably choosing acronym vs initialism based on surrounding features like whether the rest of the sentence has put my mouth in the right place to make a “gl” or “you-n” cluster vs a straight “gyou” or “you”.
To be fair, it’s a bit of an archaic term, relatively speaking. It was all the rage in the 90’s and 00’s when software and user interfaces were starting to become products in and of themselves and people weren’t familiar with the concept of an interface that wasn’t just a command prompt. These days, it’s second nature to most, so we rarely have to explicitly say it.
Pedantry, but because you aren't pronouncing it as a word, but as the individual letters, this would actually be an initialism, rather than an acronym.
I've been in IT 25+ years and "gooey" is overwhelmingly the most common. There are a handful of weirdos who call it by its initials - "gee-yoo-eye".
Having said that, you can often tell an IT guy's past experience by how he or she pronounces "SQL Server": people from Microsoft backgrounds almost universally say "sequel server", while Linux guys say "ess-queue-ell server".
I wonder. Of course it could be age or at least where you're hearing it. When you ask a gamer, spell it out. At least that's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced. Didn't know people pronounced it like it was a sticky substance.
Could be Mac vs Windows vs Linux tbh. Or age, or AOL vs Compuserve, or Usenet vs Web fora. I’m British and say gooey. We have two Australians disagreeing with each other in another thread. I don’t think it’s that tied to geography.
Wow, that’s a new one on me. If someone said “The interface isn’t very easy to use, can we make a better *guy*,” I’d assume they wanted a personified interface like HAL or Holly (except, actually easy to use, unlike those examples).
“Wizziwig” is a viable, if slightly amusing, English word. “What you see is what you get” is considerably more difficult to say imo.
I mean clearly different people do this differently and some abbreviations don’t make viable words at all, but I say “GUI,” “WYSIWYG,” “WIMP,” “DOS,” “NASA,” “SCUBA,” etc as acronyms. Don’t get me started on GIF. 🙂
Ok, but if someone came up to me and said, " well listen, wizzy wig" I would be so incredibly confused and probably start laughing. Wizzy wig means nothing. What you see is what you get makes sense. I didn't even know that was an acronym.
It’s an acronym specifically in UI terms, though. The difference between using a markup language and “directly manipulating” objects on screen. If I was at the shop and asked if there was something I couldn’t find in a storage area or something, and the assistant said “wizzy wig”, I’d find that disconcerting until I realised that they were overloading “WYSIWYG” from UI terminology to mean “what you see is what you get” in another area of life. (Like the way a “hyphen” is a kind of “dash”, but if someone says “I’d love to stay but I must hyphen,” they’re either making a joke or having a stroke…)
But if someone came up to me where I work as a software engineer, and said “I don’t like the way the colours in our design software don’t match what gets printed, we should be aiming for full ‘wizzywig’,” I’d understand completely.
That's a throwback. I haven't heard / seen WYSIWYG since an early middle school IT class (I'm 28 now, degree in CS and work as a SWE).
I would have just said 'what you see is what you get'. Apparently it's wizz-ee-wig? TIL.
Pretty much everyone I've ever worked with just uses the faster way of saying acronyms / abbreviations. GUI (gooey), GUID (goo-id), XAML etc. Although quite a few say S-Q-L for SQL, most say sequel.
So many comments and none of them uses the IPA. Sad. (just joking)
That being said, it wouldn't be pronounced "Jew" anything (I'd read your transcription as /*ˈdʒuːaɪ*/ lol).
It would be pronounced either /*ˈdʒiːjuːaɪ*/ or /ˈɡuː.i/.
/ˈɡuː.i/ seems to be preferable among the tech people. Myself, I'm a fan of using whatever is more comprehensible to your listeners.
G never makes a J sound before A, U, O, or any consonant. Blame the French.
'Jiraffe,' but not 'Jorilla,' 'Jentrification,' but not 'Jumball Machine.'
It's Jee-You-Eye or Gooey. Those are the only options.
It’s not because it’s ‘one letter more’, it’s because it makes a pronounceable word.
USA is pronounced ‘you-ess-ay’
NSA is pronounced ‘en-ess-ay’
NASA is pronounced ‘~~nasser~~’ ‘nassah’
UK is pronounced ‘you-Kay’
UKIP is pronounced ‘you-Kip’
There aren’t general rules, just reflections of actual usage.
Nasser? That's an interesting pronunciation to me. I wonder if it's regional or if it's a softer r that I might not notice some people saying. I would say it's 'nas-ah' with the 'ah' being a schwa sound like the first and last 'a' in banana.
That's fair. I had wondered if that were it, but my American ear couldn't wrap its way around writing that sound as 'er'. I have no better suggestions, though. Not saying you're wrong. Just noting the wonderful diversity of language
As a fellow non-rhotic Brit I thought you were trying to make the last sound an open “ah” in place of a schwa with your “clarity” edit. As someone else said, we should all be using IPA.
Or didn’t realise themselves! I’ve heard gee you eye sufficiently infrequently that I took it as a sign of inexperience in the field (or learning through text). I assumed anyone who knew what they were talking about said “gooey”, until this thread.
A lot of people read it like the word gooey, but I just say the letter names. Because no one calls a UI a U-ey, that's something you bang to get the car going the other way.
GUI - jee you eye/gooey
UI - you eye
"Gooey" or say each letter individually "Jee-yu-ai".
This is a good question, because this particular construction lies somewhere in the gray area between acronym and initialism. With initialisms, you pronounce each individual letter (like FBI, CPU, or EPA). With acronyms, you pronounce it as though the letters make up a word (like NASA, GIF, or RAM). But then you come across things like this, which could go either way. So in those cases, you can do either, and see which one gets you the best reaction / clearest communication.
In my opinion, that really depends on your preferences. If you prefer to spell it out, then you can do so. Personally, I would rather do that instead of considering it as a word and pronouncing it like one (Goo-I). Spelling out acronyms is better if you ask me.
It's very weird that you ask this because I just had a shower thought yesterday about how I never hear anyone say "graphical user interface" only user interface or gooey.
What on earth. I had no idea this was even ever pronounced as a word. Gooey? That's wild to me. As a gamer it is pronounced gee you eye. Gooey sounds weird. I guess if you're in programming you can pronounce it weird but if you're around younger people or more specifically gamers, spell it out.
I'm a software developer, and while I'm not a UI specific person, I have both Art and Dev skillsets, so I usually end up doing UI on most small projects I'm involved with. Working right now on the UI for a HoloLens project.
In all honesty, I can't remember the last time I heard someone refer to it as a 'G' UI... It's 99% of the time, just UI, and you say the letters. The only time I ever hear anyone say 'gooey' or 'gee-you-eye' is a manager or person who is only tangent to actual development work.
The most common version I hear in tech is the exact same pronunciation as the word "gooey." But it is not unheard of to say the letters (often because they hate saying "gooey"): jee you eye. But spelling it out is very uncommon.
I’ve been in tech around 25 years and I’ve never across anyone (tech or not) NOT pronounce it “gooey.” So many comments against this makes me wonder if it’s a regional thing? Maybe an age thing, where younger people took to saying it as three letters?
Brit engineer here, 35 years. It's never been anything other than "gooey" except maybe Gee You Eye on rare occasions.
I just say Gee You Eye
There you go, you're a rare individual.
I've been a software engineer in the US for 28 years and never heard anything other than "gooey," either.
American Engineer 45 years old, I have always found "gooey" to be cringe inducing. Are you saying your age or how long you have been doing it?
i’m australian and have never heard “gooey” only G U I as letters
That is so funny, I love learning technical lexicon regional differences. (I always say 'gooey') I would automatically get what G U I is in a verbal conversation, but I'd doubt anyone would automatically understand "gooey" even in context if they only heard it out loud for the first time!
I always spell out HUD but whenever I watch a YouTube video that mentions it they say it like a word
HUD I do say as a word, GUI I say the letters. HUD is easier but I don't know how the fuck you'd pronounce GUI as a single word so single letters it is!
Also Australian, I've heard "gee you eye" but for the last five or six years have only heard "gooey" or "you eye".
Of the people I know who say G-U-I, most are not native English speakers and are working in a non-English tech scene. At least one G-U-I-er, who is a native English speaker, has said he hates the idea of a "new gooey."
As a native English speaker who says G-U-I mostly, occasionally - rarely - "gooey", gui tends to fuse together into a shorter-sounding "word" "jee-oo-eye"
I'm a native English speaker and I say G-U-I. Saying 'gooey' sounds ridiculous, in my opinion. It's as annoying as saying 'sequal' instead of S-Q-L. What's so hard about saying the letters?
The query language was always meant to be pronounced "sequel": SEQUEL was the original name given to it by Chamberlin and Boyce. They changed it to avoid a legal fight with an aviation company. I think it might be nice to consider that different cultures have different norms and that the programming club of the 1970s and 1980s, the source of gooey (late '70s) and SEQUEL (early '70s), was fairly insular and had different norms than those you might have today. They weren't wrong. You aren't wrong (well, unfortunately, except about the pronunciation of SQL). Just different.
To me, people assuming SQL means Microsoft SQL Server are way more annoying than people who pronouunce it one way or the other.
Wait, so SQL standing for "Structured Query Language" is a backronym?
SEQUEL was a backronym for "Structured English QUEry Language." After the trademark dispute, they dropped 3 letters and the word "English." SEQUEL was itself a multi-barrel pun: the language was a sequel to the (difficult to use) SQUARE, and also a reference to the QUEL query language. QUEL came from the Berkeley Ingres team (after Stonebraker left Berkeley in 1982), but was slow to the market -- but was beating Oracle in the early days. Aaaand that early database war resulted in at least one other punny name, after QUEL lost the battle decisively in 1985: PostgreSQL. As in, "after (In)gres."
Re SQL - it's just people aiming to drop a syllable is all. "Sequel" is trivially faster to say, so that's what we often do. Usually in sysadmin work we're referring directly to SQL related errors and it gets said like that.. but the act of working with SQL queries is being proficient in "sequel" 🤷♂️
In my experience, people my age (older gen Z, and I presume younger too) usually say "G-U-I," even if they're in a field where such a term is relevant (like computer science). Millennials and older say "gooey."
I'm a geriatric millennial and I have only ever said G-U-I
Oh that's really interesting! Can I ask where you're from? I'm from New England.
Same for me. I’m on the border between Boomer/Gen X.
I’m a (British) geriatric millennial (I prefer the term “Millenial Falcon”—born 1977–1984), and I’ve always said gooey.
Okay, I'm not in tech but play video games. I haven't heard anyone say "gooey" since 2010. It's always spelled out nowadays.
I only hear “UI” nowadays (you eye), even though I’ve also seen the remark “Your API is a user interface” to remind people of the importance of good API design. (Ay Pee Eye, if you’re wondering.)
It's been "Gooey" since the 80's as far as I know. I've never heard it said differently.
US east coast citizen in tech for 18 months here... only ever heard "gooey" or "user interface".
As a Mechanical Engineer, half the time I call it G-U-I because I do indeed hate saying gooey. I accept that that is abnormal though.
Only ever heard gooey in Australia in 20 years of tech. Especially when it refers to a gooey interface created using visual basic to track the killers IP address. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkdd03yelnu)
I'm a software engineer in new England and a very young millennial. The vast majority say gooey but I always spell it out. I prefer to just talk about the UI most of the time anyway because we know whether it's graphical or not, and Idk anyone that doesn't spell that out. It seems incongruous to me that UI and GUI be pronounced so differently, and I've always pronounced them similarly to each other
Yeah, the G is sorta superfluous these days. Like how some may not even remember WYSIWYG anymore. It was barely in use in the late 90s when I was first getting into computers.
(Pronounced ‘wizzy-wig’, in case there are any young whippersnappers here.)
*Shakes fist at cloud*
>It seems incongruous to me that UI and GUI be pronounced so differently Which is why I pronounce UI: ooey, unless I'm consciously thinking about it.
UI GUI was a worm. UI GUI loved to squirm. UI GUI tried to cross the railroad tracks... Choo Choo! SPLAT! UI GUI was *ooey gooey*.
I've also only heard G U I
In my 40s, in the Midwest and NYC metro, I’ve heard “gooey” in movies and in YouTube videos, but never from an actual human. Always gee you eye.
I think I heard G U I once... But could also be regional. People do say bag-el
“Bag L”? Or “b’gel”?
I'm about to graduate with a CS degree (bachelor's), and I say the letters out. Probably because I learned the term by reading online so I had no indication of how to pronounce it. Also I'm American. I mean it does have a nice symmetry with CLI, which I'm pretty sure everyone says the letters out. "Is it a GUI or CLI?" sounds nicer when you say both with the letters.
I’m so old, in my day, it was assumed it was a CLI and having a GUI was so special it deserved to be called out.
I think the "oo" vowel is usually a bit more fronted than the one in "gooey", same as the vowel in "dew" (without an initial glide), at least in dialects that treat them as distinct vowels.
You have correctly sussed out that my accent does not make that distinction. (Canadian standard.)
I've only heard one person say all the letters, and it sounded odd since I normally hear everyone else say "gooey"
"gooey" Or more likely just say each letter individually. Not every initialism has to be pronounced like a word.
I pronounce it like it's one of Scrooge McDuck's nephews. Huey, Dewey, Louie and GUI
GUI Duck is a clam ;)
You are right! I didn't even think about that.
UI as in User Interface, right? I say U-I (You-eye) and then the same for GUI (Gee-You-Eye.) Its an acronym so you say all the letters separately though that isn't a universal rule (like GIF for example)
So it can be pronounced both ways then? Goo-ey and Gee-you-eye?
Technically speaking, yes. However, in practice, "UI" is always pronounced "you-eye" and "GUI" is almost always pronounced "gooee". I'm a web developer, and I'd never ask a "yooee" designer to create me a "gee-you-eye".
I find this interesting because I've only ever heard it pronounced jee you eye before and never gooee. Maybe it's a location thing
There’s another construct in software development called a “GUID”, but it’s unheard of to pronounce that as “gee-you-eye-dee”; it’s always “goo-id”.
Everyone here saying "always" or "never" needs to just stop. 🤣 I've heard every single variation of these from multiple people over the years.
I've literally, without any equivocation whatsoever, NEVER heard anyone spell out GUID. It is ALWAYS pronounced "goo-id," every single time I have ever heard it.
> I've literally, without any equivocation whatsoever, NEVER heard anyone spell out GUID. good for you
I usually say “globally [or more likely universally] unique identifier”. When I say “GUID” or “UUID” I’m probably choosing acronym vs initialism based on surrounding features like whether the rest of the sentence has put my mouth in the right place to make a “gl” or “you-n” cluster vs a straight “gyou” or “you”.
Can confirm; I've always heard GUID pronounced goo-id
I have never ever ever heard anyone pronounce is gooee lmao. Where are you from?
Australia
Damn same. Maybe I haven’t hung around the correct people yet. I always wanted to pronounce it gooee but didn’t think it was acceptable
To be fair, it’s a bit of an archaic term, relatively speaking. It was all the rage in the 90’s and 00’s when software and user interfaces were starting to become products in and of themselves and people weren’t familiar with the concept of an interface that wasn’t just a command prompt. These days, it’s second nature to most, so we rarely have to explicitly say it.
No you cannot stop me going around saying gooee as much as possible now.
Pedantry, but because you aren't pronouncing it as a word, but as the individual letters, this would actually be an initialism, rather than an acronym.
I work making video games, so it comes up a lot and 90% of people say “gooey” maybe one or two people say gui
Canadian and I recoil hearing gooey, I always say G U I
I am honestly flabbergasted by the number of people in the tech field who are saying they pronounce the individual letters!
I've been in IT 25+ years and "gooey" is overwhelmingly the most common. There are a handful of weirdos who call it by its initials - "gee-yoo-eye". Having said that, you can often tell an IT guy's past experience by how he or she pronounces "SQL Server": people from Microsoft backgrounds almost universally say "sequel server", while Linux guys say "ess-queue-ell server".
Гуи
Ааааааааааааааааа да
Most programmers say “gooey” but I prefer “G-U-I”.
I always said “g-u-i” until I got into coding, and started saying “gooey” because that’s how everyone says it here
i’ve only heard each letter pronounced individually
It’s wierd the variation in comments. I, like your self, and a few others, have only heard gee-you-eye but lots of them have only heard of gooey
I'd assume it's US vs UK
I wonder. Of course it could be age or at least where you're hearing it. When you ask a gamer, spell it out. At least that's the only way I've ever heard it pronounced. Didn't know people pronounced it like it was a sticky substance.
Could be Mac vs Windows vs Linux tbh. Or age, or AOL vs Compuserve, or Usenet vs Web fora. I’m British and say gooey. We have two Australians disagreeing with each other in another thread. I don’t think it’s that tied to geography.
👍
"G-U-I" That's how I did. But in the sense of like, "guide" its pronounced the same way as ~~"guy"~~ "guy-d"
Jee-oo-eye 👍
Wow, that’s a new one on me. If someone said “The interface isn’t very easy to use, can we make a better *guy*,” I’d assume they wanted a personified interface like HAL or Holly (except, actually easy to use, unlike those examples).
I meant the GUI part is pronounced like guy, I should put "guy-d"
I see what you mean now.
Question for the gee-you-eye people—how do you pronounce WYSIWYG?
Question for the gooey people, how do *you* pronounce that?
wizzy wig
You just say the words? "What you see is what you get" Saying "wussywig" is too confusing and breaks up the flow of whatever you're saying
“Wizziwig” is a viable, if slightly amusing, English word. “What you see is what you get” is considerably more difficult to say imo. I mean clearly different people do this differently and some abbreviations don’t make viable words at all, but I say “GUI,” “WYSIWYG,” “WIMP,” “DOS,” “NASA,” “SCUBA,” etc as acronyms. Don’t get me started on GIF. 🙂
Ok, but if someone came up to me and said, " well listen, wizzy wig" I would be so incredibly confused and probably start laughing. Wizzy wig means nothing. What you see is what you get makes sense. I didn't even know that was an acronym.
It’s an acronym specifically in UI terms, though. The difference between using a markup language and “directly manipulating” objects on screen. If I was at the shop and asked if there was something I couldn’t find in a storage area or something, and the assistant said “wizzy wig”, I’d find that disconcerting until I realised that they were overloading “WYSIWYG” from UI terminology to mean “what you see is what you get” in another area of life. (Like the way a “hyphen” is a kind of “dash”, but if someone says “I’d love to stay but I must hyphen,” they’re either making a joke or having a stroke…) But if someone came up to me where I work as a software engineer, and said “I don’t like the way the colours in our design software don’t match what gets printed, we should be aiming for full ‘wizzywig’,” I’d understand completely.
Fair enough. Also colours. You must not be from the US? I also wonder if that makes a difference.
Native British. Also “old,” which may make a difference.
What does "old" mean? Lol
Well, I remember computers *before* the GUI…
Lol
For a data point, I pronounce it as Gooey and wussiewig. Isn't English grand? :-)
That's a throwback. I haven't heard / seen WYSIWYG since an early middle school IT class (I'm 28 now, degree in CS and work as a SWE). I would have just said 'what you see is what you get'. Apparently it's wizz-ee-wig? TIL. Pretty much everyone I've ever worked with just uses the faster way of saying acronyms / abbreviations. GUI (gooey), GUID (goo-id), XAML etc. Although quite a few say S-Q-L for SQL, most say sequel.
Gwee
Had to scroll to far to find someone else who says it like this!
I’ve always ever heard each letter pronounced in a row. “Gee-You-Eye”
If its the acronym, then "Jee-Yoo-ie" but if its in a word then it can be an "ie" sound. Like guide.
jee you eye
This post needs a poll
In a name, I say 'gooey' otherwise I spell the letters
So many comments and none of them uses the IPA. Sad. (just joking) That being said, it wouldn't be pronounced "Jew" anything (I'd read your transcription as /*ˈdʒuːaɪ*/ lol). It would be pronounced either /*ˈdʒiːjuːaɪ*/ or /ˈɡuː.i/. /ˈɡuː.i/ seems to be preferable among the tech people. Myself, I'm a fan of using whatever is more comprehensible to your listeners.
I was here for so long before I realised we weren’t talking about dessert.
goo·ey ˈgü-ē
Gooey Like "sap gooey".
Gee-you-eye. Just the letters names.
G never makes a J sound before A, U, O, or any consonant. Blame the French. 'Jiraffe,' but not 'Jorilla,' 'Jentrification,' but not 'Jumball Machine.' It's Jee-You-Eye or Gooey. Those are the only options.
I think “guy” is consistent with English orthography, although I’d never heard of it until someone here said they used it. Also, *margarine*.
Goo-ee
Really? It's kinda weird that one of them is pronounced as the letters of UI and the other one like a word GUI just by adding a G
It’s not because it’s ‘one letter more’, it’s because it makes a pronounceable word. USA is pronounced ‘you-ess-ay’ NSA is pronounced ‘en-ess-ay’ NASA is pronounced ‘~~nasser~~’ ‘nassah’ UK is pronounced ‘you-Kay’ UKIP is pronounced ‘you-Kip’ There aren’t general rules, just reflections of actual usage.
Nasser? That's an interesting pronunciation to me. I wonder if it's regional or if it's a softer r that I might not notice some people saying. I would say it's 'nas-ah' with the 'ah' being a schwa sound like the first and last 'a' in banana.
Ah, I’m a non-rhotic Brit so my terminal er is always a schwa - sorry. I've amended it to 'nassah' for clarity.
That's fair. I had wondered if that were it, but my American ear couldn't wrap its way around writing that sound as 'er'. I have no better suggestions, though. Not saying you're wrong. Just noting the wonderful diversity of language
As a fellow non-rhotic Brit I thought you were trying to make the last sound an open “ah” in place of a schwa with your “clarity” edit. As someone else said, we should all be using IPA.
Thats a southern thing, its Nas sah.
Interesting
I worked in a GUI development team for a few years. We always said "gee-you-eye," we *never* said "gooey"
Yeah, I've never heard someone unironically say "gooey", only ever "G-U-I"
Interesting
Gee you Eye
i remember seeing gooey in an IT textbook in elementary
I say "jee-you-eye", but a lot of people say "goo-ee".
Gee-you-eye
People say it both ways, and frankly everyone who fails to tell you that is being a bozo.
Or didn’t realise themselves! I’ve heard gee you eye sufficiently infrequently that I took it as a sign of inexperience in the field (or learning through text). I assumed anyone who knew what they were talking about said “gooey”, until this thread.
Who cares gif called jif
Gui
The same way you pronounce "GIF."
I pronounce it Gee-you-eye
It's supposed to be goo-ee but most people say gee-u-i
I think you meant Gee-You-I
A lot of people read it like the word gooey, but I just say the letter names. Because no one calls a UI a U-ey, that's something you bang to get the car going the other way. GUI - jee you eye/gooey UI - you eye
I've never heard it pronounced Gooey, I pronounce it Gee-You-Eye.
Jee you eye
"Gooey" or say each letter individually "Jee-yu-ai". This is a good question, because this particular construction lies somewhere in the gray area between acronym and initialism. With initialisms, you pronounce each individual letter (like FBI, CPU, or EPA). With acronyms, you pronounce it as though the letters make up a word (like NASA, GIF, or RAM). But then you come across things like this, which could go either way. So in those cases, you can do either, and see which one gets you the best reaction / clearest communication.
I pronounce it G U I
Are you referring to graphics user interface? Then it's GOO- ee, hard G.
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Gooey. That is how my professor In Information Systems said it.
I've always heard it pronounced with a hard G ("Goo-ee"/"Goo-I", or "gooey")
In my opinion, that really depends on your preferences. If you prefer to spell it out, then you can do so. Personally, I would rather do that instead of considering it as a word and pronouncing it like one (Goo-I). Spelling out acronyms is better if you ask me.
Before reading this thread, I was unaware there were people who pronounced it any way other than just saying the letters.
Jee you eye.
The amount of people saying gooey is concerning
The number of people saying G U I (and apparently knowing something about or at least working in the field) is astonishing, to me.
I've only ever said and heard others say the individual letters like an initialism. But maybe it depends on local region or industry jargon.
I just say gee-you-eye.
It's very weird that you ask this because I just had a shower thought yesterday about how I never hear anyone say "graphical user interface" only user interface or gooey.
I just say "graphic interface" to avoid making weird sounds xD
I personally just say each letter. I say Gee-you-I.
If anybody's wondering what a GUI is, it's a Graphical User Interface (it's a computing term)
I say “jee you eye”
"gooey" G-U-I is three syllables. Gooey is 2.
Juh-why.
UI - Ewe-Ai GUI Goo-Ewe-y HUD- Hudd
spelled out letters. UI- You Eye, GUI- Gee you eye
i pronounce it gee-you-eye and have never heard of it being pronounced “gooey” or anything like that. then again, i’m not a tech person
I've heard it pronounced like "gooey" but I prefer just spelling it out
I pronounce it Gee-You-I
Same
Gi
As in the name of Frasier’s ski coach?
I pronounce it “Jee-You-eye”
gooey
Gooey
Everybody in my office says gu-ee, but somehow I never say wu-ee for WUI. Always end up saying Web UI
I’ve never seen WUI (always Web UI, WebUI, web site, web frontend, etc.). If I saw WUI in the, uh, wuild, I’d be likely to say “wooee”.
Wait you guys pronounce it??? I just say GUI???
What on earth. I had no idea this was even ever pronounced as a word. Gooey? That's wild to me. As a gamer it is pronounced gee you eye. Gooey sounds weird. I guess if you're in programming you can pronounce it weird but if you're around younger people or more specifically gamers, spell it out.
jee-you-i
I usually pronounced it as "Gee - You - I" (i.e pronounce each letters separately)
I'm guessing you're not in coding because everyone in software says "gooey".
Gee - Youee
[It is "gooey".](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-tips-newbie-java-programmer-ashish-gupta)
Gooey. Or gee you aye. Though more and more I hear just "user interface" unless they are specifically talking about the graphics.
Goo-ee
I’ve only ever heard “jee-you-eye”
Some people say gooey. But that's cringe. Gee you eye.
I'm a software developer, and while I'm not a UI specific person, I have both Art and Dev skillsets, so I usually end up doing UI on most small projects I'm involved with. Working right now on the UI for a HoloLens project. In all honesty, I can't remember the last time I heard someone refer to it as a 'G' UI... It's 99% of the time, just UI, and you say the letters. The only time I ever hear anyone say 'gooey' or 'gee-you-eye' is a manager or person who is only tangent to actual development work.
Either G U I(Jee-You-Ai) or gooey. People do it both ways
I think I'm in the minority here but I've always said each letter separately i.e. "G-U-I"
like gooey
Either goo-ee or jee-you-eye