So I was watching a video by Arcweave about the game “Spider and Web” and I think he pronounced Xyzzy as “zizzy”. I realized that whenenver I come across the word, I always, always pronounce it in my mind by spelling it out. But I have never heard the word spoken out loud by any other person. I always read it, or type it, and I guess I have spelled it out ever since the Usenet days. Does anyone else do this, or am I just weird?
There are a handful of examples of “real” words in the English language that I have been pronouncing wrong all of my life, since I only encountered them in prose during my formative years and didn’t know the proper way to do so. Even when I know the correct pronounciation, I still reflexively pronounce things “my way” and then have to correct myself. Fortunately, I don’t have to read them aloud around others, usually, so chances for embarassment are minimal.
So I’m still probably going to spell out XYZZY for the rest of my life.
I’ve always pronounced it “gzyzzy”, under the influence of my native language!
It actually took me a long time to notice that in English the letter X is only fully pronounced in certain positions within a word… but I didn’t care to change my pronunciation of XYZZY at that point (partly because in French “zizi” is a phallic euphemism )
I don’t think it would have ever crossed my mind to spell it out – it’s really interesting to see that multiple people interpreted it that way!
I pronounce it “zizzy” because it’s always had that sort of sizzling, exciting air to it
At the risk of tempting a precariously off-thread drift, this is also why I have complicated feelings about the name Zinaida. Gorgeous, powerful name (and also the name of a painter I quite like) with the unfortunate pet name “Zizi”.
in Italian, the X is called “ics” (hard C, sibilant S), like a softer “ch” (a diphtong for the hard C, whose is the K elsewhere), so, as in Ch/K X is pronounced Cs (an hard C followed by a sibilant S)
ZZ is the Z in Italian
Italian pronounce Y as i but older southern Italian, like me, tend to pronounce like the old interwovel J, the only semiconsonant in Italian
so, an english/american guy heard XYZZY like Ksizi or Xsjzj… with the full, musical Italian wovels, of course, I think people whose watched opera theatre should have an idea of this sound.
TIL!
In twelve years of living with a cat called Xyzzy I never learned this.
Still, it’s not like cats of the Internet have never been called such things. This one has a suggestion for how to pronounce XYZZY:
As of late, I’ve been reading it like “Izzy” (like the nickname for Isabelle) or “Ighk-zee” (like the starting sound in ichneumon). Not entirely sure why. I normally don’t spell out acronyms in general, though.
Which is also weird because I usually default to ⟨x⟩ being pronounced as [ʃ]—because of my Kaskhoruxa conlang—which would make “shizzy”, but I remember someone on this forum joking that they pronounce “XYZZY” by sneezing, so my brain latches onto the voiceless velar fricative lol.
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