alt Hacker NewsThe most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
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There is precedent among English speakers for "dub" or "dubya".
George W. Bush is something referred to as "dubya", for the "W" part. And modern slang "W" or "dubs" as shorthand for "win".
"Dubya" fits in the ABC song just as well as double-you, while "dubs" can fit as "dubs and X, Y and Z".
You might have better luck with NPR, they assure me that they read every email.
The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.
It’s commonly called “dub” when brevity is called for, as in “dub dub dub” = www.
Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.
In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.
It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!
Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.
Not to mention "www", which when pronounced is actually three times longer than its expansion.
> I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
The erstwhile World Wide Wrestling Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:
By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)