After the term World Wide Web came to public acceptance, the acronymn WWW was then introduced. I wouldn't really blame anyone hesitating in pronouncing the acronym itself. Isn't it mouthful? It have more syllabus that the original than the phrase it stands for, six syllabuses (or syllabi) more to be precise. That's thrice more!
With some odd twist of fate, the WWWs are now embedded in all our webpage URLs. If my memory serves me correctly, which I constantly doubt, we used to read aloud web addresses as "The World Wide Web dot [Bla Bla] dot com".
Then, we actually started to call it "Triple Double-Yoo", which cut down from nine to five syllabi. (Hooray!)
When I was in Sydney, I overheard over fm103.2 (a great radio station in Sydney by the way. I still stream them live!), which their announcers address it as "The Double-Yoos" which personally I think it's kinda cute. Well done lads. Now we are down to four.
The breakthrough for me finally came during my last trip to Germany. When I heard over the airwaves, that went something like, "Vee Vee Vee Punkt [Bla Bla] Punkt Dee Ee". Okay, I can't really remember how they pronounced "dot", which I think is "punkt", again don't trust a guy that needs his head examined. But that's immaterial. What matters to this discussion is that at least for the Germans, the "Ws" are pronounced as "Vee" as in VIVA. Finally we are down to THREE!
Now, I’m sure that there are other languages out there that have mono-syllabic letter "W", this is just an example that it can get better. Just in case you are wondering, in German, "V" is pronounced as "fee" as in FIFA.
So, it came with no surprises that we now completely ignore them in web addresses.
kuancheen|kuala.lumpur|20060308
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