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ASCII Pronunciation Rules for Programmers

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 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 Rare Names
! exclamation mark
bang
pling
excl
not
shriek
factorial
exclam
smash
cuss
boing
yell
wow
hey
wham
eureka
spark-spot
soldier
control
" quotation marks
quote
double quote

literal mark
double-glitch
dieresis
dirk
rabbit-ears
double prime
#
hash
pound sign
number sign
pound
sharp
crunch
hex
mesh
grid
crosshatch
octothorpe
flash
square
pig-pen
tictactoe
scratchmark
thud
thump
splat
$ dollar sign
dollar
currency symbol
buck
cash
string
escape
ding
cache
big money
% percent sign
mod
grapes
double-oh-seven
& ampersand
amp
amper
and
and sign
address
reference
andpersand
bitand
background
pretzel
' apostrophe
single quote
quote
prime
glitch
tick
irk
pop
spark
closing single quotation mark
acute accent
( ) opening / closing parenthesis
left / right paren
left / right parenthesis
left / right
open / close
open / close paren
paren / thesis
so/already
lparen/rparen
opening/closing parenthesis
opening/closing round bracket
left/right round bracket
wax/wane
parenthisey/unparenthisey
left/right ear
[ ] opening / closing bracket
left / right bracket
left / right square bracket
bracket / unbracket
square / unsquare
u turn / u turn back
{ } opening / closing brace
open / close brace
left / right brace
left / right squiggly
left / right squiggly bracket/brace
left / right curly bracket/brace
brace / unbrace
curly / uncurly
leftit / rytit
left / right squirrelly
embrace / bracelet
< > less / greater than
bra / ket
left / right angle
left / right angle bracket
left / right broket
from / into (or towards)
read from / write to
suck / blow
comes-from / gozinta
in / out
crunch / zap
tic / tac
angle / right angle
* asterisk
star
splat
wildcard
gear
dingle
mult
spider
aster
times
twinkle
glob
Nathan Hale
+ plus
add
cross
intersection
, comma cedilla
tail
- dash
hyphen
minus
worm
option
dak
bithorpe
. period
dot
point
decimal point
radix point
full stop
spot
/ slash
stroke
slant
forward slash
diagonal
solidus
over
slak
virgule
slat
\
backslash
hack
whack
escape
reverse slash
slosh
backslant
backwhack
bash
reverse slant
reversed virgule
backslat
: colon dots
two-spot
; semicolon
semi
weenie
hybrid
pit-thwong
= equals
gets
takes
quadrathorpe
half-mesh
? question mark
query
ques
quiz
whatmark
what
wildchar
huh
hook
buttonhook
hunchback
@ at sign
at
strudel
each
vortex
whorl
whirlpool
cyclone
snail
ape
cat
rose
cabbage
commercial at
^ circumflex
caret
hat
control
uparrow
xor sign
chevron
shark (or shark-fin)
to the
fang
pointer
_ underline
underscore
underbar
under
score
backarrow
skid
flatworm
` grave accent
backquote
left quote
left single quote
open quote
grave
backprime
backspark
unapostrophe
birk
blugle
back tick
back glitch
push
opening single quote
quasiquote
| bar
or
or-bar
v-bar
pipe
vertical bar
vertical line
gozinta
thru
pipesinta
spike
~ tilde
squiggle
twiddle
not
approx
wiggle
swung dash
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.

Written by Jeff Atwood

Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror