Pronunciation of "www"

WWW (or www) is an initialism for World Wide Web. In English, WWW is the longest possible three-letter abbreviation when spoken, requiring six to nine syllables, depending on how they pronounced it, whereas the twelve letters in "World Wide Web" are pronounced with three syllables. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped:

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for.
Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

Tim Berners-Lee rejected suggestions to change the World Wide Web name over pronunciation issues, arguing that this peculiar feature of the name would make it memorable. As his invention gradually gained ubiquity, it came to be called simply the Web.

English pronunciation

In standard English pronunciation, www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the names of the letters (/ˈdʌbəl.juː ˈdʌbəl.juː ˈdʌbəl.juː/ or double-u double-u double-u). However, in colloquial speech the name of the letter W is sometimes shortened. In some parts of the United States, the l is often dropped and the u reduced, for /ˈdʌbəjə ˈdʌbəjə ˈdʌbəjə/, whereas in the Southern United States W is reduced to two-syllables, /ˈdʌbjə ˈdʌbjə ˈdʌbjə/.

The form dub-dub-dub has long been used occasionally worldwide,[1] but is the most common abbreviation used in New Zealand.[2][3][4]

An abbreviation W3, /ˈdʌbəl juː ˈkjuːbd/ ("double-u cubed"), is inspired from mathematical notation for exponentiation (W raised to the 3rd power). Many of the original papers describing the World Wide Web abbreviated it this way, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was named according to this early usage. The original W3C logo had a superscript 3 and the consortium's domain name is still www.w3.org.

Other languages

In Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Polish and other languages, this problem doesn't occur because the letter W is already uttered as a single syllable.

In some languages, such as Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish it is common practice to say "ve"(v) instead of "dobbelt-ve" in abbreviations, so "www" becomes "ve, ve, ve". This is also used by Romanian, Serbian, etc. In Danish, it is also usual to say "tre gange dobbelt-ve" ("three times double u").

In many languages which give the letter W a name that translates to "double V", each w is substituted by a v, so www is shortened to "vvv" instead. Another practice is to use a numeric shortcut that translates w-w-w as triple W.

References

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