I forget what my previous answer was to this question, but my answer is wrong now. You’re correct; I’m siding with you.
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Depending on where you live, it’s either “ecks wye zed zed wye” or “ecks wye zee zee wye.”
Or “plugh.”
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I don’t think Pete’s answer has received the attention it deserves! And it’s interesting to hear something that makes it sound even more believable.
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I accept Pete’s answer and it has changed my life forever.
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It’s pronounced choolthoo right? Please tell me I’m not saying it wrong, lol. Also, while I will always say zizzy, I think cheesy is the correct, lol. I have just got zizzy in my brain too much.
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That comes from an example where the player is in a cheese factory and uses the magic word to make a platter of cheese levitate towards them, right?
That can’t possibly be a coincidence? The author of the example (Emily Short, I guess) at least acknowledges the similarity of “xyzzy” with “cheesy”, right? Because it’s hitting me right now.
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Isn’t it “kuh-THOO-loo”?
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Oh my god you’re right. I’ve been reading it wrong this whole time. 
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On a related note, I’m never sure how to pronounce unfamiliar words starting with an X… and I just realized my screen reader pronounces the first syllable of xyzzy like the beginning of xylophone.
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It’s a bit of an oddity in English! If you see a word starting with X in English…
If it’s a technical term, or it doesn’t feel “foreign”, it’s probably from Greek. It’s transcribing a Greek letter (Ξ) that’s pronounced “ks”, but English doesn’t like consonants before an S at the start of a word, so we drop the “k” and pronounce it like an S or a Z instead. It’s the same reason we don’t pronounce the T in “tsunami” or the P in “psalm”.
If it’s from old-timey Spanish, it used to be pronounced “sh”[1], but is now pronounced “kh” instead (a velar fricative[2], like an especially harsh sort of “h”). Spanish mostly got rid of the letter X when it shifted from “sh” to “kh”, because it became identical with J (used to be “zh”[3] like in the middle of “treasure”), and they didn’t need two letters for the same sound. But it sticks around in old names like Mexico and Don Quixote. The only example I can think of at the start of a word is Ximénez, but there are probably others too.
If it’s from Africa, it’s probably combined with other consonant letters (like XH or GX or NKX), and it represents a click consonant—a special kind of consonant found only in southeastern Africa. The English alphabet didn’t have any letters for these consonants, so when people wanted to spell them, they either invented new letters or repurposed the redundant ones (C, Q, and X). The X one is a lateral click, like the “clucking” sound you use to spur a horse, but you can also replace it with a “k” sound in a pinch: most people pronounce the name of the Xhosa language as “kosa”.
Otherwise, it’s probably something very similar to “sh”[4]. This is how the letter X was once used in Spanish, and it’s still used that way in the other languages near Spain (Portuguese, Catalan, Basque), even if Spanish has changed it to a “kh”[5] by now. It’s also used this way for various languages first recorded by Spanish-speaking conquistadors: when they heard a “sh”[6] sound in Mayan and Aztecan languages and so on, they wrote it with an X. And the convention stuck around longer than the conquistadors did.
When the Chinese government overhauled their romanization systems in the middle of the 20th century, they also borrowed that convention: Mandarin has two sounds that are very close to “sh”, so they used SH to spell one and X to spell the other. That’s why Shanghai gets a SH but Xi’an gets an X. So if a name comes from Portuguese, Catalan, Basque, Nahuatl, Mayan, or Chinese, the X is a “sh”. Generally a safe bet for any words that “sound foreign” (i.e. aren’t Latin or Greek).
Which of these does “xyzzy” fall into? No idea! You all can be the judge.
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Genuinely, someone needs to write a Zorkian alphabet and language. (Okay, XYZZY/PLUGH/PLOVER is Adventure, but still.) Include Frotz and Gnusto and stuff. Although, those are spells rather than individual words…
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Yeah, I’d skimmed this thread and ever used “search” but since not all posts are loaded at once I’d missed it!
I feel so… not alone anymore! 
It’s not how I pronounce it, but neither is it wrong! That string of letters is but an approximation of a barely pronounceable old horror! Whatever you call him, just don’t call him late for dinner. Actually, don’t call him for dinner at all. Safest.
My dirty, filthy mind and its dirty, filthy associations would probably not get away with that (forshame, the “j” comes very easily to me) (that last parenthesis in itself is already pretty dicey). However I admire your purity and innocence, so you have have your zizzy and eat it too.
…
…no, don’t mind me, it’s just my dirty mind. There’s absolutely nothing untowards in the previous paragraph anywhere at all.
BTW, I say KTH-UU-LOO, with no space between the K and the TH. Like the “KTH” is a singe weird thing where I do the “K” by raising my tongue to the top of my soft palate at the back, and as soon as I release it to produce the “K” sound, I join the tip of my tongue to the upper front teeth and let the air flow out between tongue and front upper teeth to produce the “th” sound.
The closest we have, I think, is the Encyclopedia Frobozzica.
Including spells might be a spoiler for different games, so I dunno.
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Looks like it (“you pronounce this as Xhi-zee”):
Check casting xyzzy:
if the player does not wear the amulet of elocution, say "You are unable to articulate the second 'z' separately from the first, and the spell fails in a disdainful puff. Must be Parisian magic." instead;
if the player has the plate, say "The plate of cheeses twitches uncomfortably, aware that it should be doing something, but not sure what." instead.
Carry out casting xyzzy:
move the plate to the player.
Report casting xyzzy:
say "Under the influence of the Amulet of Elocution, you pronounce this as Xhi-zee. And lo, from nowhere, a [plate] appears!"
There’s also Cheese-friendly Game Directory - IFWiki which doesn’t mention XYZZY 
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In the manner of a formerly precocious autodidact I am, or I suppose was, curator of a diverse collection of utterly indefensible mispronunciations.
These days I’ve surrendered to the inevitability of saying XYZZY by naming each letter. But back before the web made looking things up trivial and so durable house rules about these sorts of things were more common, it was “zig-zee”.
And back when discussing Cthulhu (kuh-THOOL-hu) at all was less of a commonplace, among my tabletop gaming friends we had all decided, for some reason, that the correct pronunciation was kuh-THOOL-ee-o.
The place where Elric lived was mel-ne-bonny and not, as Moorcock says it, mel-NIB-o-nay.
On the other hand because James Branch Cabell gives the pronunciation in an introduction or forward or some such, I’ve always pronounced Poictesme as PWA-tem, as intended.
On the subject of pronounciations, Myiazaki pronounces the name of his own studio “Jiburi”.
Trying to tell people you love “Studio Jiburi” films, however, is likely to make you come across as pedantic and pretentious.
…hasn’t stopped me.
…I don’t actually say it out loud very often, or indeed, hardly at all. So that’s a bullet dodged. Or postponed.
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I just can’t. My own particular compulsive tendencies take exception to the asymmetry. I want to fill in the missing letter…
X-Y-Z; Z-Y-X
I’ve got to agree, though: Cheesy may be my new pronounciation.
And also, I say: “Kuh-Thoo-Loo” much, much more than I try to verbalize XYZZY, because the whole genre of Lovecraftian board games makes this commonplace for my hobbies.
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Hmmmmm.
XYZZYX
Cheesyx.
Cheese-icks.
...I like it.
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You don’t pronounce it “if”?
Well, now this whole conversation has gone off the rails.
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I say if for ifcomp, but if I’m initialising on its own I guess I’d say eye-eff. But really if it was not a conversation with someone already familiar with terms then I’d say “interactive fiction” in full.
Jiburi makes me think of someone going overboard on Japanese names should take priority over dub names and calling Sonic the Hedgehog Sonikku za Hejihoggu all the time and similar for the rest of the SegaSonic cast(no clue if any of the western comics/animations with original characters with no game counterpart have been localized into Japanese, but most, if not all, of the characters originating from the Games, their Japanese names are just their English names rendered in Japanese phonetics, including leaving their species inimported English instead of using the Japanese word for their species… and given how many characters in Sonic have kind of random English words for names, watching the fansubs of Sonic X back in the day was practically a crash course in how to borrow English words into Japanese… Also, any anime set in a European or US-inspired setting where all of the characters have European names that are contorted beyond recognition in the Japanese and the English dub is just trying to undo the corruption caused by Japanese’s rather limiting phonetic rules… Not sure I even want to know how Fullmetal Alchemist’s cast’s names are rendered in Japanese.
Also, pretty sure I’ve always pronounce Cthulhu like kuh thoo loo, which is how my screen reader says it, but I understand Lovecraft deliberately chose a spelling that would make people questiong the pronunciation and I’m pretty sure I’ve incountered variants including see thoo loo and see thool who and probably others.