GIF creator Steve Wilhite accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Webby’s. Image via MSN

There are a lot of unsolved mysteries on the Internet: the origins of Goatse, Cher’s Twitter account and most pertinently, the pronounciation of ‘GIF’, the now-ubiquitous image format that was once relegated to net hell in the early 00s. In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Wilhite, the creator of the nu-emoticon for people too aloof to communicate with mere words, set the record straight: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” Like the peanut butter?

As a soft-G kind of guy, this delights me, but it might not delight the White House Tumblr, which sided with the hard-Gs. Suckers. 

[via Gizmodo] 

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Vidal Wu is an intern at Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @vidalwuu.

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