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According to this video with Brian Kernighan, the correct pronunciation of the classical Unix editor ed is "Eee. Dee." — not "Edd".

So that made me wonder — what about the other classical editor, vi... should it be pronounced as "Vee. Aye." or as "Viii"? Does anybody know?

(I'm ignoring vim for this discussion — I suppose it is simply "Viimm".)

user3840170
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Baard Kopperud
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Chenmunka Apr 06 '22 at 18:34
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    I have heard people pronounce it 'six', and claim it is its version number, and at the time roman numerals were still used. – Aganju Apr 07 '22 at 03:01
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    @Aganju You say that there was any significant decline or Roman numeral since the advent of the vi editor? – Vladimir F Героям слава Apr 07 '22 at 15:14
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    @VladimirFГероямслава The joke is that vi is so old the Romans were using it. – amalloy Apr 07 '22 at 18:19
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    @Chenmunka: The first comment from Jean​‑François Fabre's joke comment wasn't "extended discussion", and was the best part about this whole Q&A. Please restore it. Especially since others have made the same "six" comment (as a non-joke?). – Peter Cordes Apr 08 '22 at 08:37
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    Why have two people voted to close this question as "opinion based". Since two answers have been given referencing the official way to pronounce "vi", it clearly isn't opinion based. – JeremyP Apr 09 '22 at 15:16
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    @JeremyP For a radical descriptivist, this doesn’t matter, since a coiner of a term has no more authority over how it is supposed to be used than anyone else. – user3840170 Apr 18 '22 at 10:24
  • @user3840170 If you basically invents a word to name a program or a company, I would think you can decide what's the correct pronunciation too. If the author decided that one pronunciation is the correct one, then that pronunciation is the program's name, while any other pronunciations simply aren't. – Baard Kopperud Apr 19 '22 at 13:55
  • To a descriptivist, speaking of an objectively correct pronunciation is just as absurd as speaking of the objective worth of a currency. Saying a word is objectively correct to pronounce a certain way, because the one to create it said so, is just as absurd as saying that a coin is objectively worth a million dollars because the one who minted it said so. (I am not a descriptivist nearly that radical, but I can appreciate the position at least.) – user3840170 Apr 19 '22 at 14:15
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    I am so old that I remember that (on BSD), you could invoke vi with its full proper name: "visual" (but the shorter "vi" worked as well, so no one used "visual"). That was probably before the rise of the Roman empire. -- Note that only one of the two preceding sentences is a joke. – Klaws May 02 '22 at 05:48
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    @Klaws I have of course heard of the VISUAL and EDITOR environment variable which would be set to vi and ed ... Didn't know you could start it with visual though. – Baard Kopperud May 03 '22 at 09:25

2 Answers2

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vi is pronounced as the two separate letters, /ˌviːˈaɪ/ (in English); listen to the same Brian Kernighan (also re-confirming the ed pronunciation).

Vim’s pronunciation is explicitly documented:

Vim is pronounced as one word, like Jim, not vi-ai-em.

Nemo mentioned this interesting email about “Unix-room” pronunciations from Rob Pike, which includes a number of interesting tidbits in relation to this question:

  • some Unix-room denizens did pronounce ed like the first syllable of “editor”;
  • vi was little-used but apparently pronounced /ˌviːˈaɪ/ by all its users;
  • on Plan 9, vi was a MIPS interpreter (“v” for MIPS, along with “5” for ARM, “k” for SPARC, and “q” for PowerPC), also pronounced /ˌviːˈaɪ/.

Note that vi came from BSD, not the Unix room, so Unix-room pronunciation isn’t necessarily canonical (if there is such a thing anyway in a living language). But Mark Plotnick’s answer gives a reference from vi’s creators themselves.

Stephen Kitt
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From An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi, by the people who wrote vi, William Joy and Mary Ann Horton:

This document provides a quick introduction to vi. (Pronounced vee-eye.)

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Mark Plotnick
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    That first author's name surprised me. I knew that Bill Joy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy) had put together the first cut of vi. Then it struck me that William Joy and Bill Joy were likely the same person – Flydog57 Apr 06 '22 at 16:12