“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations … They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
– Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the GIF and winner of a Webby award, expresses his irritation at the bastardization of the word. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to change the way I pronounce the word. JIF is peanut butter, not an animated image of Tanning Mom modeling a bikini. But that may have been the point. Fun fact about GIFs: A website called the GIF Pronunciation Page suggests that the GIF was purposefully named to make it sound like the popular brand of American peanut butter, “one of the principal three programmer foods (the other two being Pepsi and nacho cheese Doritos).” Still not going to change the way I say it. [BBC]
