Is “GIF” Pronounced “Jiff” or “Giff”?

Is it pronounced “giff” or “jiff”? According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF image file format, “choosy developers choose JIF.” If you recognize this tagline as a riff on a famous peanut butter brand slogan (“Choosy moms choose Jif”), you know the intended pronunciation is with a soft “G,” like in “giant” or “gym.”  

Wilhite doubled down on this pronunciation at the 2013 Webby Awards, displaying a massive GIF while accepting his award. The short animation plainly stated, “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’ NOT ‘GIF.’” So, if the creator promotes this pronunciation, that should resolve the dispute, right? Not necessarily: the pronunciation of words, much like their meaning, is decided by the population that uses them, not the people who created them.

A GIF, short for “graphics interchange format,” is a type of looping animation created by Wilhite in 1987. GIFs are widely used today in marketing, entertainment, and texting, but despite their ubiquity, there’s still much debate over the pronunciation of their name. Even with Wilhite’s proclamation, the question persists: Should it be pronounced with a hard “G” as in “gift” or a soft “G” as in “gem”? The short answer is that both are technically acceptable.

The argument for the hard “G” is fueled by what the “G” stands for: graphics. However, no rules state that acronyms must be pronounced correspondingly to their full names. Take GEICO, or “Government Employees Insurance Company” (which, despite its name, is a private company). In this acronym, the “E” is pronounced with the “I” to form an /aɪ/ sound, like in “height,” while in “employees,” the “E” creates an /e/ sound, as in “edit.”

In 2020, in a humorous attempt to settle the GIF/JIF dispute, Jif partnered with GIPHY (an online GIF database) to release limited-edition jars of peanut butter with labels reading “Gif.” However, despite the efforts of Wilhite and big peanut butter, both pronunciations remain in common use today.