"It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me
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Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed. His obituary page notes that “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man.”
Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.
While there have been long-standing debates about the correct pronunciation of the image format, Wilhite was very clear on how he intended for it to be said. In 2013, he told The New York Times, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”
He reiterated that stance while accepting a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the invention of the GIF later that month, using an animation to give his acceptance speech. (You can watch the whole clip of him receiving the award here.) “After 25 years, they finally honored that achievement that he did,” Kathaleen said, adding that creating the GIF was the thing he was most proud of.
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Graphical. Guh.
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@Aqua-Letifer said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
Graphical. Guh.
Yup. I get it.
And I pronounce with a hard "g" as well.
But...the guy who invented it says that I'm wrong. Now that he's dead, I can ignore that comment.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
Just wanted to get this out before anyone else...
Spelled with a J.
I don't see where the hangup is, people.
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@89th said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
@Horace said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
Not to brag, but I once wrote some code to read tiff images.
Soft T? As in a Spanish sounding “thiff”?
Yes and ironically I wrote it in Lisp. Not really but it would be nice if so.
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@Aqua-Letifer said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
Graphical. Guh.
This. The inventor of the file format was wrong, if he said otherwise.
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@George-K said in "It's a soft 'g', so it's 'jif'. Trust me:
OK, who says "gif" with a "soft" g?
I don't and never have.
No, of course not
Hard G, no question
And the story doesn't say "the inventor", it says " one of the lead inventors of the GIF"
So maybe he was just one of many guys hanging around the office when gif was invented.
The soft G sounds ridiculous
