Well here’s something. I’ve been mentally mispronouncing Imgur, the ubiquitous home to image macros, rage comics, memes and that other thing I’ve been mispronouncing forever, .gifs.
Turns out Imgur is pronounced “Imager”. (I’d been doing it phonetically: im-GURRRRRR) Thank goodness I had no occasion to say it out loud.
But if people aren’t saying “Did you see that thing in Imgur the other day,” the same way they would about The New York Times, well, so what. As this profile by BusinessWeekBusinessWeek points out, Imgur does better traffic than the Times — 120 million monthly unique visitors.
Reddit, for whom founder Alan Schaaf created imgur back in 2009, is a still tremendous user of the service and driver of traffic to it. Imgur has grown even larger than Reddit, however; a gallery Imgur itself curates draws another 77 million views a day on its own.
As you can imagine, this is a far cry from the site’s origin, when it ran off user donations for its first six months. It’s doing very well with the ads it now hosts, thank you very much.
How Imgur Became a Photo-Sharing Hit [BusinessWeek]
Comments
15 responses to “Quick, How Do You Pronounce Imgur, The Site With All The GIFs?”
The imgur FAQs have had the correct pronunciation for ages.
I’ve never actually pronounced it out loud, now I think about it. Just read it in my head as the letters. “Eye em gee you are”
i have always said imjer (and gif with a hard g as in good)
I’ve always said Imager, well Imager. Yay!
I think I’ll stick with im-grrrrr.
This is the only correct answer.
Imager. I’ve never thought it was ever pronounced with a hard “g”
I never considered it could be pronounced any way other than imager. Also gif with a soft J, like jogging.
Busseriously, gif = jif. I’ve always said it that way and the inventor says it’s that way, and it’s his call.
GIF == Jif?
Phonetically. mmger. The “i” and the is clearly meant to be silent.
I believe it’s pronounced “Ermahgerd”.
I could be wrong, though.
But I’m right.
Imager forever. It images. It is an imager.
They have about 3TB of pictures from an interview I read last year sometime. Has probably grown a bit since then. They also store dupes separately instead of once!
How topical for me, I was just having this conversation with a mate. Turns out I was right.
I’ve been pronouncing it ‘image-urr’. Does that make me weird? I was close…