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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label TeXpronounce</title>
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<h3>How should I pronounce &ldquo;TeX&rdquo;?</h3>
<p/>The &lsquo;X&rsquo; is &ldquo;really&rdquo; the Greek letter 
Chi, and is pronounced by
English-speakers either a bit like the &lsquo;ch&rsquo; in the Scots word &lsquo;loch&rsquo;
([x] in the IPA) or (at a pinch, if you can&rsquo;t do the Greek sound) like
&lsquo;k&rsquo;.  It definitely is not pronounced &lsquo;ks&rsquo; (the Greek letter with that
sound doesn&rsquo;t look remotely like the Latin alphabet &lsquo;X&rsquo;).
<p/>This curious usage derives from Knuth&rsquo;s explanation in the TeXbook
that the name comes from the Greek word for &lsquo;art&rsquo; or &lsquo;craft&rsquo;
(&lsquo;<em>techni</em>&rsquo;),
which is the root of the English word &lsquo;technology&rsquo;.  Knuth&rsquo;s logo for TeX is
merely the uppercase version of the first three (Greek) letters of the
word, jiggled about a bit; we don&rsquo;t use that logo (and logos like it)
in this FAQ (see 
<a href="FAQ-logos.html">Typesetting TeX-related logos</a>).
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXpronounce">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXpronounce</a>
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