Tag Archives: English

Saying lib out loud

Not being a native English speaker, I’ve always pronounced libcurl with a ‘lib’ part as if it was part of ‘liberty’, and ‘curl’ with a K sound and ending with ‘earl’. I don’t know of any Swedes who would not pronounce ‘lib’ like that, but when speaking Swedish we’re of course highly influenced by other things so it’s not really relevant.

It wasn’t until I got on FLOSS Weekly that I fully realized that some English speakers would actually pronounce the ‘lib’ part as the first syllable of ‘library’ and that does make sense considering lib is short for library.

But libcurl is just a smaller player here. How do you English speakers pronounce libc? libxml? libgcc?

And yes, this is another one of those really important issues in life. Almost as important as how to close parenthetical expressions with emoticons!