Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!agate!sunkist.berkeley.edu!raymond From: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Name that character! (definitive list) Message-ID: <1991May29.000449.19048@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 29 May 91 00:04:49 GMT Article-I.D.: agate.1991May29.000449.19048 References: <10599@castle.ed.ac.uk> Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Reply-To: raymond@math.berkeley.edu (Raymond Chen) Distribution: comp Organization: U.C. Berkeley Lines: 133 In-Reply-To: eanv20@castle.ed.ac.uk (John Woods) Originator: raymond@sunkist.berkeley.edu Why does everyone feel compellet to post their favorite pronunciations? In article <10599@castle.ed.ac.uk>, eanv20@castle (John Woods) writes: >I wonder if there is a definitive list... Indeed there is. It used to be part of the comp.unix.questions Frequently Asked Questions file, but it has since moved into the `Jargon File'. Many thanks to Maarten Litmath for maintaining the USENET ASCII Pronunciation Guide for many years. (Though the list below does seem to be missing some of the cleverer names in Maarten's list. Like `Donald Duck' for `&'.) [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. Common slang names for ASCII characters are collected here. See individual entries for , , , , , , , , , , , and . This list derives from revision 2.2 of the USENET ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order, character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, "official" names appear first, then others in order of popularity (more or less). ! exclamation point, exclamation, bang, factorial, excl, ball-bat, pling, smash, shriek, cuss, wow, hey, wham " double quote, quote, dirk, literal mark, rabbit ears # number sign, sharp, crunch, mesh, hex, hash, flash, grid, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratchmark, octothorpe, thud $ dollar sign, currency symbol, buck, cash, string (from BASIC), escape (from ), ding, big-money, cache % percent sign, percent, mod, double-oh-seven & ampersand, amper, and, address (from C), andpersand ' apostrophe, single quote, quote, prime, tick, irk, pop, spark () open/close parenthesis, left/right parenthesis, paren/thesis, lparen/rparen, parenthisey, unparenthisey, open/close round bracket, ears, so/already, wax/wane * asterisk, star, splat, wildcard, gear, dingle, mult + plus sign, plus, add, cross, intersection , comma, tail - hyphen, dash, minus sign, worm . period, dot, decimal point, radix point, point, full stop, spot / virgule, slash, stroke, slant, diagonal, solidus, over, slat : colon ; semicolon, semi <> angle brackets, brokets, left/right angle, less/greater than, read from/write to, from/into, from/toward, in/out, comesfrom/ gozinta (all from UNIX), funnel, crunch/zap, suck/blow = equal sign, equals, quadrathorp, gets, half-mesh ? question mark, query, whatmark, what, wildchar, ques, huh, hook @ at sign, at, each, vortex, whorl, whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat V vee, book [] square brackets, left/right bracket, bracket/unbracket, bra/ket, square/unsquare, U turns \ reversed virgule, backslash, bash, backslant, backwhack, backslat, escape (from UNIX), slosh. ^ circumflex, caret, uparrow, hat, chevron, sharkfin, to ("to the power of"), fang _ underscore, underline, underbar, under, score, backarrow ` grave accent, grave, backquote, left quote, open quote, backprime, unapostrophe, backspark, birk, blugle, back tick, push {} open/close brace, left/right brace, brace/unbrace, curly bracket, curly/uncurly, leftit/rytit, embrace/bracelet | vertical bar, bar, or, or-bar, v-bar, pipe, gozinta, thru, pipesinta (last four from UNIX) ~ tilde, squiggle, approx, wiggle, twiddle, swung dash, enyay Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The ``$'', ``#'', and ``&'' chars, for example, are all pronunced `hex' in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, $ in the 6502 world and & on the Sinclair and some other Z80 machines).