Back in the 1980s, I knew an engineer at Bell Labs who used troff
and he always pronounced it tee-roff.  All of the people at HP who
used it also pronounced it the same way.

Likewise, at HP, we always prounounced nroff as en-roff, so the
logical way to pronounce groff would be gee-roff.

I've never heard professional Unix/Linux users pronounce them any
other way.

Same with vi (which is essentially an acronym for "visual interactive").
It's always been pronounced vee-eye, but vim is pronounced the same as
when used when referring to "vim and vigor".

I still refer to vim as vi out of habit, and because I've used it for
nearly 30 years.  I created a shell alias so when I invoke the command
from the terminal window I always type "vi".

Clarke

On 07/28/2013 03:29 AM, Tethys wrote:
Robert Marks writes:

Actually, how is troff pronounced? Troff? T-roff?
And groff?  Hardly G-roff but possible.

When I first encountered them in the '80s, they were pronounced
n-roff and t-roff, so those names stuck and thus groff became
g-roff when it came along a bit later.

Tet



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