"Double-u-double-u-double-u" does not trip off the tongue. Yet I seem to say and hear it hundreds of times a day. Attempting to pronounce a web address in English is not easy.

As noted in Wikipedia, www is the longest possible three-letter string to pronounce in English. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams remarked that "the World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."

You might expect a better way to emerge and spread, as new words usually do. But the www has been around for more than 15 years, and we're still waiting. Technically, the web could be made to work fine without www, but I don't think we're about to see the end of it.

Other languages are fortunate that w has only a single syllable. Pronounce an address in Czech and you'll start with "v??, v??, v??".

Alternatives like "dub-ya dub-ya dub-ya", or "tri-dub" might have become locally acceptable. But in my experience much of the English speaking world still labours with "double-u-double-u-double-u". Such a global resource deserves a snappy, and more universal phrase.

Ideally, one of the shorter variations already circulating would rise to become most accepted. But which? And how can we accelerate the process?

Help us find a better way to pronounce www