I know it's not actually true, but I choose to believe that "su" stands for superuser and "sudo" is a witty pun which means both "superuser do" and "pseudo" because you're pretending to be a superuser.

in the days of yore when I learned to program in basic before learning English I pronounced goto with the second o rhyming with the first one, it embarassignly also took some time after learning English to figure out that goto was "go to" as my brain had made the programming association and wasn't treating it as a language construct at all...

Speaking about sudo, learned that before living in an English speaking country, so everybody pronounced rhyming with su-go (say) not su-do and I still pronounce it that way (which I guess it's wrong!)

ah, the joys of learning English as a written language first, even now after living in North America for nearly 20 years occasionally I find words I completely mispronounce due to having learned them from books

I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that "su" doesn't stand for superuser but for the rather bland "set uid".

This is a useful discovery though, as it points you towards the fact that as well as running as super user (the default) sudo can run a command as any target user (e.g. `sudo -u zofrex dosomethingevil`).

why not "switch user", hah

I always though it was abbreviated of super-do - much like the other unixisms (ls, cd etc.)

> I'm still not sure if it's properly pronounced 'pseudo' or 'sue-do

Those are both pronounced the same way.

> Those are both pronounced the same way.

The prior is pronounced /ˈso͞odō/

The latter is pronounced /so͞odu/

The first one is sue-doe, the second is sue-do