Until I learnt the correct way of pronouncing it, I always thought it was "en-ginks".

Sometimes there can be a long gap (even many years) between first reading about something and first using its name in conversation. A long time for mispronunciations to stew away in my brain (assuming the person I'm talking to even knows how to pronounce it themselves.)

I spent an embarrassing amount of my life thinking epitome was 'epa tome' instead of 'a pit oh me'.

Here’s a sizable list of words like that: http://english.stackexchange.com/q/1431/1506

Mine was "hitherto." I pronounced it "hit-hurt-oh" once. Once. (It's "hither too" if you didn't know.)

Better than hit-her-too, I guess.

Oh... today I learn.

I still thought that until just now - that there were 2 different words: epitomy and epitome; epitome being stronger: suggesting some kind of singular platonic ideal the former meaning just a good example of this kind of thing

Just as I used to think misled (miss-led) and misled (my-zled) were 2 different words - the latter implying an element of malice

'cache' being pronounced 'kash', not 'kaysh' is one that's still wrong in my brain.

Oh, don't feel too bad; a few weeks ago, my wife had lunch with the Ivy League-pedigreed nth-generation CEO of a reasonably large midsized company who used the exact same mispronunciation. Paris being worth a mass, she chose not to correct him.

There was a story floating around about a self-taught C# programmer going for a job, and verbally describing the language as "C Pound".

I have been known to call that language "Coctothorpe" when in a biting mood.

Or editorilizing C-hash

I especially recall the old debate in the mid-1990s about whether Linux was pronounced "Lee-nux" or "Lin-ux."

I still always think "an-jye-nex" (like a chemical that would give you angina).

I've taken to calling it "engine eggs" in protest

What have you done! Now nginx will read "engine eggs" to me.

Are you ESL (or bilingual)? I'm curious because word-initial [ŋ] is unpronounceable to most native English speakers.

For others like me who are phonetically-illiterate, [ŋ] is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_nasal

I’m a native English speaker with a background in phonetics and a silly brain. I speak several languages very poorly. :)

Rather like Larry Wall:

> I started trying to teach myself Japanese about 10 years ago, and I could speak it quite well, because of my phonology and phonetics training–but it’s very hard for me to understand what anybody says. So I can go to Japan and ask for directions, but I can’t really understand the answers!

Everyone I've asked about how they initially pronounced nginx said "enjinx". Maybe 4 people total, all native english speakers.

If it's supposed to be pronounced "engine X" they probably could have named it "engineX". That's what you get for trying to be cool.

I suspect, it was more to do with enginex[.com;.org] domains not available.

Do you have a link to that talk? Sounds relevant to a side project I'm working on. Thanks!

At the office I always hear it pronounced 'en-Gen-nix'

wait...it's not "in-jin-ix"?