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Yesterday my boss called our design person on the phone and asked her about designing a /fave-eye-con/. She asked him to repeat it a couple of times, and then finally (after a convoluted explanation about favorites and icons), the lightbulb came on and she said, "Oh! you want a /fav-ee-can/!"

Now, presumably the design person is the one more likely to have encountered the accepted pronunciation of favicon - she gets to actually make the things, while the rest of us only notice them if they're missing. However, /fav-ee-can/ just... doesn't work for me.

Is there any sort of consensus on how this word ought to be pronounced?

Marthaª
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    I don't have any references so I'm not creating an answer, but I've only ever heard it as /FAV-eh-con/ or /FAVE-eh-con/. –  Jan 21 '11 at 18:30
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    @Mark: so have I, but of course I can't find a single one of those YouTube videos right now. Sigh. – RegDwigнt Jan 21 '11 at 18:50
  • Do you remember whether the boss stressed only the "fav" part, or also the "i"? (Ik think I'd say /FA-vih-kn/, with a short "a" as in "family", but I really have no idea and rarely hear it pronounced.) – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Jan 21 '11 at 20:37
  • Could you please replace those with IPA? I would do it myself, but you haven’t given enough info to go on. – tchrist Dec 15 '12 at 19:58
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    @tchrist: sorry, I don't do IPA. (If anyone else wants to add some phonetic-alphabet jibberish, that's fine, but if you replace my actually-readable pronunciations, be aware that I'll be rolling back your edit just as soon as I see it.) – Marthaª Dec 16 '12 at 02:08
  • @Marthaª The trouble is that to add IPA and make it clear what the pronunciation you’re talking about are, you need to be able to figure out what the pronunciations you’re talking about are, and you simply haven’t given enough information here to do that. You may think what you’ve written here are “actually-readable pronunciations”, but I for one have absolutely no idea how the second is meant to sound—neither where to stress it, nor what the vowel lengths and qualities are. My instinctive reading would be [fəˈviːkən], sounding almost just like ‘a vegan’ (with an f at the front), but → – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 08 '15 at 15:20
  • → that doesn't seem very likely. It seems an extremely odd way to pronounce favicon, at least. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 08 '15 at 15:22
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: as far as I can remember, the design person's pronunciation was "extremely odd": it did, indeed, sound kind of like "a vegan" with an f at the front, except with the stress on the "a" instead of "veg". So /FAV-ee-can/, /fav/ rhyming with "have", /ee/ with, well, "eek", and /can/ as in the word that means "able to" or "metal container for preserving food" (except that since that syllable doesn't have any sort of stress, the vowel becomes kind of smudged/schwa-like). – Marthaª Aug 08 '15 at 16:40
  • @Marthaª Well, that really is strange. I’ve heard both fave-icon (/ˈfeɪv.ˈaɪkɒn/) and favvy-con (/ˈfævɪˌkɒn/ or /ˈfævɪkən/) fairly regularly, but anything that rhymes with can is most bizarre. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Aug 08 '15 at 16:44
  • Insofar as pronunciation aids comprehension, it makes sense to me to say "fave-EYE-con" since that sounds like what it's actually describing and it's easier to infer its meaning. I work with a lot of young web engineers, and simple things like this go a long way in helping them learn contextually (it's impractical to constantly stop to explain anything they might not know). – squidbe May 23 '18 at 19:59

4 Answers4

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I usually pronounce it /fav-eye-con/ or /fav-ih-con/, but I've never heard anyone else pronounce it (at all).

Consensus also seems to be /fav-ih-con/:

SLaks
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    +1 for the research. I did my own informal sampling in the office just now, showing 10 people the word on a piece of paper, and got 5 different pronunciations. Let's hope the number of pronunciations doesn't increase in proportion to sample size. – Robusto Jan 21 '11 at 18:38
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    The two links seem to be what you're calling "fav-ih-con" (/ˈfævɪkɑn/) rather than "fav-ee-con" (/ˈfævi:kɑn/). – nohat Jan 21 '11 at 18:47
  • @nohat: You're right; fixed. – SLaks Jan 21 '11 at 18:48
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    @Robusto: there are only so many ways to pronounce that... I'd expect you wouldn't find someone pronouncing it "banana". – Jürgen A. Erhard Jan 21 '11 at 19:47
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    @jae: I was being facetious, of course. But, since you mention it, my statement doesn't suggest that all possible phonological utterances would be the consequence of the proportional increase I kiddingly proposed. Only that for a sample size S, there might exist S/2 pronunciations that in some way approximate the original. Absurd? Sure, that's the point. – Robusto Jan 21 '11 at 19:52
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    @Robusto, @jae, given all the possible pronunciations of the vowels and stress patterns, it turns out there are about 103 different ways you might pronounce the string "favicon" in English. – nohat Jan 21 '11 at 21:39
  • @nohat: I stand in awe of your nerdishness. And I mean that with the utmost respect and admiration. – Marthaª Jan 22 '11 at 15:34
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    I always have called it fav-ih-con with analogy to rubicon or necronomicon. Both of those are derived from icon, I think, but drop the eye sound – Lawton Jul 19 '12 at 20:51
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    I've only ever heard fave-icon. Like "favorite icon" but with the "or it" / "rit" missing. – David Schwartz Oct 20 '12 at 01:16
  • @nohat - how can that be. 103 is a prime number. I would expect the answer to be "something like" 3x3x2x3 (ways to pronounce first vowel, times ways to pronounce second, times way to pronounce third, times number of different ways to stress). I can't think if all the different ways these vowels could be pronounced, and it's possible that there are some "impossible" combinations - I just can't see them. – Floris Mar 24 '14 at 13:34
  • @Lawton: The Romans called that river Rubico, and I think it has little to do with the word icon. – Junuxx Apr 29 '14 at 17:43
7

I definitely say "fav-ick-on", the a like in family. I guess the emphasis is on the first syllable, but it's slight.

As this is a recently coined word I don't think you're going to find a canonical answer yet. This is good, because it means YOU get a chance to contribute to the language by promoting YOUR favorite pronunciation until there's finally a widely accepted norm!

Andrew
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I presume the etymology of the word is the combination of the words "favorite" and "icon", since a website's favicon.ico file is the icon that appears next to a bookmark (which, in Internet Explorer, resides in the Favorites menu). Consequently, I've always pronounced the word as /fav-eye-con/.

That being said, I can understand how someone who is unaware or unfamiliar with how the file name was decided might pronounce it more in line with how it would be pronounced as a single word given its spelling.

I have to wonder about all of the other computer phrases that are nothing more than two terms squished together - how are these terms pronounced? For instance, the program to edit the Windows Registry is named regedit. Since it's a combination of the words "Registry" and "edit" I pronounce it /redge-edit/, but I am now curious if the layperson would pronounce it as /ree-gedit/ or /ra-get-it/ or something else entirely.

Scott Mitchell
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    As a webmaster, I have always been perfectly aware of the etymology of favicon, and yet I pronounce it /ˈfævɪkɑn/. I also don't pronounce SQL as sequel. As to regedit, how about asking that as a separate question? – RegDwigнt Jan 21 '11 at 19:10
  • @RegDwight: I take it you pronounce SQL as Ess-que-ell, or is there some other pronunciation I am unfamiliar with? Also, how do you pronounce regedit? – Scott Mitchell Jan 21 '11 at 19:20
  • Yes, I pronounce it /ˌɛskjuːˈɛl/. – RegDwigнt Jan 21 '11 at 19:22
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    I tried pronouncing it as "Squeal" for a while, but I couldn't get anybody else to go along with me. (Also I have always pronounced it "REJ-ed-'t".) – Hellion Jan 21 '11 at 19:47
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    I've always pronounced favicon as if it were fav + icon, but it occurs to me that I don't treat emoticon the same way. Maybe /ˈfævɪkɑn/ is indeed the consistent approach. – gpr Jan 22 '11 at 06:17
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    @gpr: Great point, although it seems to me that "fav-icon" rolls off the tongue much easier than "emot-icon." – Scott Mitchell Jan 22 '11 at 22:05
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When in doubt stick with good old fashioned phonics: pronounce the first syllable with a long "a" and the second syllable with a short "i" third syllable as "con" (as in "icon"). "Fave-ih-con"

Virtually_Here
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