Is SQL pronounced "s-q-l" or "sequel"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9378303

by kevinguy • 11 years ago

12 37 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Is SQL pronounced "s-q-l" or "sequel"?

hobs• 11 years ago

Both, I often find that microsofties say sequel and open source guys say s-q-l, but that is just a personal observation.

MattBearman• 11 years ago

I've noticed that as well

wglb• 11 years ago

Yes, and I don't mean to be snarky. I hear it each way.

joshuapants• 11 years ago

Hmmm, I've always said "sequel" but that's just because I heard someone else say it that way when I first heard of it.

Bo0m• 11 years ago

I hear them both on a daily basis, neither are wrong. A classic article about this: http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-...

grandalf• 11 years ago

S Q L ...

Sequel is incorrect, but it often overtakes within a company if a few people don't realize this and start referring to it.

Morieris• 11 years ago

Back before I ever spoke to anyone about databases, I pronounced it to myself as "squirrel". Good times.

MalcolmDiggs• 11 years ago

Who has time for 3 syllables? "Sequel"!!

Jeremy1026• 11 years ago

"Se-quel" is 2 syllables.

itsybitsycoder• 11 years ago

And S-Q-L is 3, so "Se-quel" saves time. :)

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

Who has time for 2 syllables? "Squeal" (or "Squill", if you prefer shorter sounds) is clearly superior.

Stratoscope• 11 years ago

When I worked at Gupta Technologies back in the '80s and we wrote SQLBase and SQLWindows, we all pronounced it "sequel".

These were people who came from Oracle and such places, so I naturally assumed that this pronunciation was correct.

joeclark77• 11 years ago

Both are acceptable.

daggerhashimoto• 11 years ago

i use both, randomly. It should be used for a pRNG.

mrcold2• 11 years ago

SQL is an initialism for Structured Query Language. So the correct pronunciation is "s-q-l". Acronyms have a natural flow and can be read as is (NASA, LASER etc.). Initialisms do not and must be read one letter at a time.

Grammar. It's magic.

smt882• 11 years ago

Few language rules are absolute and universal. Language is, at its heart, an agreement among people about what words mean what. So the fact that many, many people say (and understand) "sequel" means that it can also be correct.

mrcold2• 11 years ago

Except we are talking about the English language. And it does have rules, they are called grammar. Plus, you're using the bandwagon fallacy. Just because a lot of people do it doesn't make it right.

rprospero2• 11 years ago

If I follow your logic properly, then, when reading the sentence

"The disk with all the PNG files was read too frequently for the IDE controller, so we switched to a SCSI drive"

you would pronounce "PNG" as "Pea En Gee", "IDE" as "Eyed", and "SCSI" as "Ess See Ess Eye"? I would have pronounced "PNG" as "Ping", "IDE" as "Eye Dee Ee", and "SCSI" as "Scuzzy". I wonder if our differences are regional?

For the record, I pronounce "SQL" the same was that you do.

jordsmi• 11 years ago

Is saying "Ping" actually a thing? I've only ever heard "P-N-G"

giaour• 11 years ago

The language was originally called the Structured English Query Language, or SEQueL for short.

gary__• 11 years ago

and because of a trademark dispute over the acronym SEQUEL, it was changed to SQL

seanmcdirmid• 11 years ago

Inside Microsoft: sequel, outside Microsoft: s-q-l

jeremyevans• 11 years ago

"s-q-l". It is ambiguous if pronounced "sequel". :)

vile• 11 years ago

'Sequel', because even though it's grammatically incorrect, it rolls off the tongue much better.

rufusjones• 11 years ago

Neither-- it's pronounced "Gif".

cafard2• 11 years ago

Like the present or like the peanut butter?

jharger• 11 years ago

Peanut butter makes a great present!

(Unless the recipient is allergic)

ctb_mg• 11 years ago

When I worked with a lot of MySQL users, they tended to say "s-q-l". These days I'm in SQL server and they say "sequel".

cafard2• 11 years ago

Standalone, "s-q-l". In compounds--SQL Server, SQLDeveloper, PL/SQL, MySQL--usually "sequel". But again "s-q-l" in PostgreSQL and T-SQL.

Do I feel strongly about it? No.

brightsize• 11 years ago

"Sequel". But I also used to pronounce LED (light-emitting diode) as "lead" until I heard an optical engineer (with PhD) say "l-e-d" and felt stupid. "Ping"(PNG) still sounds weird to me but scuzzy(SCSI) and as-key(ASCII) don't. It's a mystery.

bbcbasic• 11 years ago

Pronounce it as a vowel-less word i.e.: "skwll"

krapp• 11 years ago

I pronounce it "squirrel" just to troll people.