ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for
Programmers
5-7 minutes
As programmers, we deal with a lot of unusual keyboard
characters that typical users rarely need to type, much less
think about:
$ # % {} * [] ~ & <>
Even the characters that are fairly regularly used in
everyday writing -- such as the humble dash, parens,
period, and question mark -- have radically different
meaning in programming languages.
This is all well and good, but you'll eventually have to read
code out loud to another developer for some reason. And
then you're in an awkward position, indeed.
How do you pronounce these unusual ASCII
characters?
We all do it, but we don't necessarily think much about the
words we choose. I certainly hadn't thought much about this
until yesterday, when I read the following comment left on
Exploring Wide Finder:
A friend sent me a Java code fragment in which he looped
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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through printing "Thank You!" a million times (it was a
response to a professor who had extended the deadline on
a paper). I responded with a single line of Ruby to do the
same, and a single line of Lisp.
He wrote back: "Underscores, pipes, octothorpes, curly
braces -- sheesh... I'll take a mild dose of verbosity if
means I don't have to code something that looks like it's
been zipped already!"
What the heck is an octothorpe? I know this as the pound
key, but that turns out to be a US-centric word; most other
cultures know it as the hash key.
I'm often surprised to hear what other programmers name
their ASCII characters. Not that the words I personally use
to identify my ASCII characters are any more correct, but
there's far more variability than you'd expect considering the
rigid, highly literal mindset of most programmers.
Perhaps that's why I was so excited to discover the ASCII
entry in The New Hacker's Dictionary, which Phil Glockner
turned me on to. It's a fairly exhaustive catalog of the
common names, rare names, and occasionally downright
weird names that programmers associate with the ASCII
characters sprinkled throughout their code.
How many of these ASCII pronunciations do you
recognize? Which ones are the "correct" ones in your shop?
Common Names
!
exclamation mark
bang
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Rare Names
factorial wow
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
pling
excl
not
shriek
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exclam
hey
smash
wham
cuss
eureka
boing
spark-spot
yell
soldier
control
"
quotation marks
quote
double quote
literal mark
rabbit-ears
double-
double
glitch
prime
dieresis
dirk
#
hash
sharp
grid
pound sign
crunch
crosshatch scratchmark
number sign hex
pound
mesh
tictactoe
octothorpe thud
flash
thump
square
splat
pig-pen
$
dollar sign
dollar
% percent sign
currency
escape
symbol
ding
buck
cache
cash
big
string
money
double-oh-seven
mod
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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grapes
& ampersand
address
amp
reference
amper
andpersand
and
bitand
and sign
background
pretzel
'
apostrophe
single quote
quote
prime pop
glitch spark
tick
closing single
irk
quotation mark
acute accent
( ) opening / closing
so/already
parenthesis
lparen/rparen
left / right paren
opening/closing parenthesis
left / right parenthesis
opening/closing round
left / right
bracket
open / close
left/right round bracket
open / close paren
wax/wane
paren / thesis
parenthisey/unparenthisey
left/right ear
[ ] opening / closing
bracket
square / unsquare
u turn / u turn back
left / right bracket
left / right square bracket
bracket / unbracket
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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{
opening / closing brace
brace / unbrace
}
open / close brace
curly / uncurly
left / right brace
leftit / rytit
left / right squiggly
left / right squirrelly
left / right squiggly
embrace / bracelet
bracket/brace
left / right curly
bracket/brace
<
less / greater than
from / into (or towards)
>
bra / ket
read from / write to
left / right angle
suck / blow
left / right angle bracket
comes-from / gozinta
left / right broket
in / out
crunch / zap
tic / tac
angle / right angle
*
asterisk
star
splat
+
,
plus
cross
add
intersection
comma
cedilla
tail
-
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dash
worm
hyphen
option
minus
dak
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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bithorpe
.
period
radix point
dot
full stop
point
spot
decimal point
/
slash
diagonal
stroke
solidus
slant
over
forward slash
slak
virgule
slat
\
backslash slosh
hack
backslant
whack
backwhack
escape
bash
reverse slant
reversed virgule
backslat
reverse
slash
:
colon
dots
two-spot
;
semicolon
weenie
semi
hybrid
pit-thwong
=
equals
quadrathorpe
gets
half-mesh
takes
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
?
question mark
query
ques
@ at sign
at
strudel
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quiz
huh
whatmark hook
what
buttonhook
wildchar
hunchback
each
snail
vortex
ape
whorl
cat
whirlpool rose
cyclone
cabbage
commercial at
^
circumflex
xor sign
caret
chevron
hat
shark (or shark-fin)
control
to the
uparrow
fang
pointer
_
`
underline
score
underscore
backarrow
underbar
skid
under
flatworm
grave accent
backquote
left quote
left single quote
open quote
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backprime
back tick
backspark
back glitch
unapostrophe push
birk
opening
blugle
single
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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers
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grave
quote
quasiquote
|
bar
vertical line
or
gozinta
or-bar
thru
v-bar
pipesinta
pipe
spike
vertical bar
~
tilde
approx
squiggle
wiggle
twiddle
swung dash
not
enyay
sqiggle (sic)
If you're curious about the derivation of some of the odder
names here, there are an extensive set of footnotes (and
even more possible pronunciations) at the ascii-table.com
pronunciation guide.
So the next time a programmer walks up to you and says,
"oh, it's easy! Just type wax bang at hash buck grapes
circumflex and splat wane", you'll know what they mean.
Maybe.
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