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When pronouncing URL, I say (roughly) "you-are-ell." A colleague insists that (roughly) "earl" is more common. Is there a widely accepted pronunciation? Within the computer world or without?

David
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Rusty Tuba
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    For shorter acronyms such as URL, it is better to pronounce each of the letters, to avoid ambiguity. In general though, there's no hard and fast rule as to how an abbreviation should be pronounced, just follow convention. – Kris Dec 31 '14 at 06:52
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    Either is acceptable. Spelling it out is the more common style, probably by a factor of 5:1 among my acquaintances, but many folks (including myself) who usually spell it out will resort to "earl" from time to time. – Hot Licks Nov 13 '15 at 11:04
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    As far as showing competency/experience goes, in my experience it has been regional. In central Illinois, all my professors and the career software engineers at my company all said pronounced url and uri as words, now I find myself in central Missouri and everyone says the letters of the acronym. – kcar Aug 02 '16 at 14:28
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    I pronounce it: You Are Ell. – Lambie Jul 18 '19 at 14:52
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    When going to school for computer science, I had one professor that pronounced it earl. My classmates and I thought it was weird. Take that as you may. :) – Zack Jul 18 '19 at 15:23
  • I wonder if the prevalence of one pronunciation is affected by whether the speaker has a rhotic dialect of English. – Theodore Aug 04 '21 at 21:31
  • I usually spell out acronyms unless they're obviously designed to be pronounced (like if they look like other words/names or are long but still pronounceable like a word). – Brōtsyorfuzthrāx Aug 06 '21 at 09:14
  • The authors of the Overflow newsletter should get a necromancy badge of some sorts for including this 6 years old question in the latest issue of their mailing. – thymaro Aug 06 '21 at 10:01
  • When people start saying things like earl I'm always tempted to start 'pronouncing' IBM and USA and so on. Let's not forget abominations like newkyeler. – Asashadeofpurplegray Aug 07 '21 at 00:34
  • And then there's SQL, as (1) "sequel" or (2) "ess queue el". Different communities, mostly. – Drew Aug 07 '21 at 04:04
  • How do you start a sentence? You obviously start it with a lower case letter. The standard way is with an upper case letter. So you would have been better to phrase your title "How should URL be pronounced?", as this would seem to be the question you wished to ask on an English Language forum. But, no, let me do it for you. – David Aug 07 '21 at 18:33
  • I’d be interested to know how it’s pronounced in the Urals. – David Aug 08 '21 at 19:27
  • I think it should be pronounced "duke": https://youtu.be/h6Uht69h8Is – Hot Licks Sep 01 '22 at 20:45

4 Answers4

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It's not scientific, but the Google Ngram of "a URL" (blue line) versus "an URL" (red line) for the period 1990–2008 suggests that the published works contained in the Google Books database favor the initialism pronunciation over the acronym pronunciation by a substantial margin:

By way of contrast, consider the Ngram chart for "a FAQ" (blue line) versus "an FAQ" (red line) for the same period (note, however, that the magnification of the Y-axis in the FAQ chart is about twice that in the URL chart):

This is consistent with my memory of preferences at the computer and technology magazines where I worked as a copy editor for two decades: without much effort, you could stir up an argument about whether "a FAQ" or "an FAQ" was preferable; but partisans of "an URL" were hard to find.

Sven Yargs
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    Comparing the frequency of the accompanying articles is such a clever way of determining which pronunciation is more popular! Nice answer, +1 – Zubin Mukerjee Mar 23 '20 at 19:23
  • In what way is it not scientific? Not an exact science, doubtless. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 05 '21 at 13:36
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    The results may even be inflating slightly the evidence for the an URL pronunciation. I believe some written instances of an result from a momentary distraction of a seeing the following vowel and forgetting about pronunciation. – DjinTonic Aug 05 '21 at 14:52
  • @DjinTonic in published edited books? Though I just had a quick look at the results, and a number of them had Dutch authors. On multiple occasions I have witnessed Dutch people being perplexed that an English speaker did not understand the supposedly English word vip, with the English speaker eventually coming to understand that they meant vee-eye-pee. So maybe they are pronouncing it earl, but not being native speakers, it doesn't count for much. – phoog Aug 08 '21 at 01:54
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    Oh, oh. Another empty Ngram chart. You might want to bring it to the community's attention. – Mari-Lou A Sep 29 '22 at 21:10
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Merriam-Webster's entry for 'URL' agrees with you. So do those at Oxforddictionaries.com, Cambridgedictionaries.com and Macmillandictionary.com. Netlingo is agnostic, giving both pronunciations.

(That's not to say that the pronunciation 'earl' is wrong, but on a cursory look at the evidence it does seem to be less prevalent than the one which spells out the initials.)

I'm not aware that non-techies and those who work with computers in a professional capacity pronounce the term differently.

Erik Kowal
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    Looks like Merriam-Webster now also shows "ər(-ə)l" as an alternate pronunciation. I've been a technie all my life, since before URL was a word, and have always pronounced it "earl". – Gray Apr 01 '15 at 19:30
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    That's interesting. I've been a software developer for 20 years, with much of that time spent in web development, and I don't recall ever hearing it pronounced "earl". We talk about URLs and URIs, which are related but distinct concepts, and it seems natural to me to spell out the acronyms to highlight the distiction between them. – mikeagg Nov 13 '15 at 11:02
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    Don't know how representative I am, but when I hear "earl" I judge that speaker to be "less technical" than ones that say "you-are-ell" – BlueWhale Jul 19 '16 at 15:24
  • Are there any other examples of U being pronounced 'ə' at the start of a word? I don't know IPA so will use some clumsy forms but in my head I can only think of 'uh', 'yoo', and perhaps 'oo' as in the Hebrew noun 'Uri'. – Lazarus Dec 31 '17 at 10:51
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    @Lazarus off the top of my head - urban, urbane, urn, ursine, urticaria, urticate. – Dawood ibn Kareem Aug 04 '21 at 04:52
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    @Lazarus I know what you're trying to say but many to most native speakers would be hard placed to notice a distinction between an actual schwa and the sound "uh" (/ʌ/). What you're probably trying to verbalize is that many speakers aren't going to pronounce this with a schwa at all but with the /ɜ/ that starts "earl". – lly Aug 05 '21 at 01:15
  • @CassLopez none of those words starts with U. – phoog Aug 08 '21 at 01:39
  • @phoog Yes you’re right, I misunderstood the question. I will remove the comment. – Cass Lopez Aug 08 '21 at 12:41
  • This will obviously vary but here in the US many is not all of the ‘un’ words such as unclear are pronounced with the 'ə' sound. – Cass Lopez Aug 08 '21 at 12:45
  • @CassLopez it's easy to do. But I think that most of the un- words (the short-u ones, that is, to distinguish them from words like unicorn) are more the "uh" of bus than the schwa of the last syllable of status (notwithstanding the fact, as lly notes, that many do not recognize this distinction). In any event, for URL, the effect of the R is effectively to overtake the vowel entirely, leaving the same vowel as in burg, berg, and bird. – phoog Aug 08 '21 at 13:14
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    This answer would be much more useful if it actually listed the preferred pronunciations of each source. – Stuart F Aug 03 '22 at 19:50
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I have just watched 30 short videos from YouGlish, in which 28 people pronounce 'URL' as 'you-are-ell' while 2 people pronounce it as 'earl.' So about 93% of the sample speakers pronounce it letter-by-letter.

Heartspring
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Anshan Today
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It varies for me. If I'm saying something like "NSURL" I'll use "en ess earl", probably because it's tedious saying "en ess you are ell". If I'm describing something to a tech, I'll usually use "you are ell" now, because some people upset when they hear the shorter "earl". I certainly still think of it as "earl"... why waste time/space in your own mind, ffs? Ha!

As to the URL vs URI differentiation, I always say "you are eye" for the latter, which just makes sense to me, since you're not getting much benefit from saying "Eury" (i.e., it only cuts one syllable). Basically, I think a logical way to decide is to use phoneme compression/reduction (with a monosyllabic result being the ideal case). But tech industry types are weirdly illogical when it comes to jargon.

A corollary question, for those who insist that it must be "you are ell"; how do you pronounce the common name for the "Client URL" command line program? That one I invariably pronounce as "curl" (as in hair).

jbm
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