🚀 Try it in 30 seconds
curl -fsSL https://pronounce.renlab.ai/install.sh | bash # one-liner, no clone
say-it kubectl
or the explicit way:
git clone https://github.com/anzy-renlab-ai/pronounce.git
cd pronounce && ./install.sh
say-it kubectl
That's it. Now try say-it GIF, say-it nginx, say-it Pydantic, say-it --why JSON, or say-it quiz for a 10-question challenge. Linux users: install espeak-ng (sudo apt install espeak-ng) and the CLI just works. Windows: same CLI under WSL or git-bash + PowerShell. Or skip install and use the browser at pronounce.renlab.ai — where 49 word pages now link the 🎬 moment the creator says the name (Knuth on TeX, Lamport on LaTeX, Evan You on Vite, Stallman on GNU — example: Tcl).
⭐ If say-it kubectl saves you one cringey standup moment — star the repo. It nudges more devs to contribute their favorite mispronounced project name.
🏆 The developer pronunciation scoreboard
1,973 entries — 1,316 carry a citable source — 116 settled by the creator themselves, 181 the community still argues about. The famous ones:
✅ Settled — the creator said so
| Word | It's… | …not | Settled by |
|---|
| GIF | "jif" | "ghif" (hard-G speech cue) | Steve Wilhite (creator), NYT 2013 |
| nginx | "engine X" | "n-jinx" | NGINX official |
| YAML | "yam-ul" | "yammel" | yaml.org |
| GNU | "guh-NEW" (hard g) | "noo" | GNU Project |
| LaTeX | "lay-tek" | "lay-teks" | Lamport / LaTeX project |
| TOML | rhymes with "knoll" | "tom-el" | Tom Preston-Werner (creator) |
| Tcl | "tickle" | "T-C-L" | John Ousterhout (creator) |
| awk | "auk" (like the bird) | "A-W-K" | Aho / Weinberger / Kernighan |
⚔️ Still contested — both readings are in active use
| Word | Camp A | Camp B |
|---|
| kubectl | "koob-control" | "cube-cuddle" |
| SQL | "sequel" | "S-Q-L" |
| JSON | "JAY-son" | "JEE-son" |
| GUI | "gooey" | "G-U-I" |
| JWT | "jot" (per RFC 7519) | "J-W-T" |
Every cell has IPA and audio; 1,316 also carry a citable source. Browse all 1,973 entries →
Disagree with one? That's the whole point — open a PR with your reading and a source. The argument is the dataset.
What you're actually getting
- 1,973 entries — 1,316 carry a citable source. Confidence-tagged (
creator-clarified / community-consensus / contested), each with a citable URL where one exists (we'd rather leave it blank than fabricate one). Wilhite said GIF is "jif" at the 2013 Webby Awards. Crockford says JSON is "JAY-son" (RailsConf 2009). RFC 7519 says JWT is "jot". The dictionary cites them.
- Multi-reading audio. For words where the debate is real — GIF, SQL, GUI, char, regex — the CLI chains the alternates after the primary with a spoken "or:" so you hear the debate without staring at the terminal.
--solo skips the tail once you've internalized it.
- One Bash CLI, no npm runtime. No sudo, no framework bootstrap, no surprises. It detects macOS
say, Linux espeak-ng/espeak, or Windows PowerShell System.Speech. The repo also ships a Claude Code skill and an MCP server so your AI answers "how do you pronounce X?" with audio, not a phonetic guess.
- A docs-native GitHub Action. Scan Markdown changed by a pull request and emit a sourced pronunciation glossary in the job summary — no API key, dependency install, or network request.
- Canonical website audio. The site plays each committed canonical MP3 first and uses Web Speech only as a fallback if playback fails.
$ say-it --why JSON
word JSON
ipa /ˈdʒeɪsən/
respelling_us jay son
confidence contested
source Wikipedia § Pronunciation
url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Pronunciation
Why not just Google?
Because Google gives you 47 Reddit arguments and a YouTube clip you have to unmute. IPA gives you /ˈkuːb kənˌtroʊl/ — a reference, not a teacher.
You don't need a phonetic transcription. You need to hear the word. Twice. Maybe three times. Done.
say-it ships a community-maintained dictionary of how engineers actually say the names that trip everyone up — and feeds the intended respelling to your OS's text-to-speech engine, so kubectl comes out as koob-control, not whatever your computer guessed from the letters.
After a spoken say-it <word> lookup, the CLI prints a one-line ★ nudge at most once per day (only when stdout is a terminal — kept out of pipes, redirects, and -q runs; if the cache dir is unwritable it repeats each run). Disable it with SAY_IT_NO_STAR=1.
Famous moments
Some pronunciations aren't opinions — the creators settled them. The dictionary cites every one:
以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗
