The 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.
Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:<p>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.<p>(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)
There is precedent among English speakers for "dub" or "dubya".<p>George W. Bush is something referred to as "dubya", for the "W" part. And modern slang "W" or "dubs" as shorthand for "win".<p>"Dubya" fits in the ABC song just as well as double-you, while "dubs" can fit as "dubs and X, Y and Z".<p>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.
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.
A radio talk show host I really enjoyed came up with this:<p>.'triple double ya site dot gom."<p>You can say that fast and people get it.
Indeed. This has to rank as one of the worst branding mistakes in history. All TBL had to do was call the subdomain "web" but instead he went for the infuriatingly fussy and tongue-tying "www".
It’s (slightly) easier to type www than web.
It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.<p>Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.<p>If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
> It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.<p>Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....
It’s commonly called “dub” when brevity is called for, as in “dub dub dub” = www.<p>Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…
Though it does make you sound like a boy scout...<p>Wuh works better, imho, though it does tend to degrade into "wuh'uh'uh" when said quickly.<p>The BBC tried very hard in 1994/5 to persuade people to pronounce "http://www." as "hit web" - thankfully, that failed to gain any traction whatsoever.
We proposed “dub-three” in accord with a guy who was fighting the Clipper Chip
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!
Technically, one of the sounds of W is heard at the end of its name, and is seen more clearly in its homophone "yew" (rhymes with ew, shrew, mew, chew, few, Drew, etc.).
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.
You could shorten it to “sextuple u”.
For a native speaker in casual speech, it'll only be at most a bit slower than its expansion because English is stress-timed
> I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.<p>I support your campaign.
Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
W is "double u"
The erstwhile World Wide Wrestling Federation <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute</a>
Why not simple, <i>W</i>: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead