Help us find a better way to pronounce www
"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
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