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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".)
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:
ed like the first syllable of “editor”;vi was little-used but apparently pronounced /ˌviːˈaɪ/ by all its users;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.
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.)
