Wikipedia:Today's featured article/June 15, 2022

The pronunciation of GIF has been disputed since the 1990s. GIF, an acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format, is popularly pronounced in English as a one-syllable word. The most common pronunciations in English are (with a soft g as in gin) and  (with a hard g as in gift), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G. Many public figures and institutions have taken sides in the debate; Steve Wilhite, the file format's creator, gave a speech at the 2013 Webby Awards (slide pictured) arguing that only the soft g pronunciation is correct. Polls show that the hard g pronunciation is more common, although the frequency of each pronunciation varies by region; in addition, some speakers enunciate each letter in GIF, making it. English dictionaries generally accept both main alternatives as valid, and linguistic analyses show no clear advantage for either main pronunciation based on the pronunciation frequencies of similar English words.