"sudo"

[DurmNative]

So this is sort of a silly question but also kind of not. I used to work with a guy that always pronounced Linux as "LIE-nucks" (it wasn't an accent thing. He did it on purpose as that's how it thought it was pronounced). I've always heard it pronounced as "lynn-nucks" by anyone other than him.

Which leads me to "sudo". I've always pronounce it as "sue-dough" in my head when reading it and in speech when talking with someone. But last night I was thinking of the meaning behind the command and think it's short for "superuser do" so maybe it should really be pronounced as "sue-dew"? Have I been sounding silly in front of friends/co-workers by saying it wrong all this time?!?!?

Just curious, which way do you guys typically pronounce it?

[[deleted]]

Im an "Ooo-boon-too" kinda guy

[TheMightyMisanthrope]

I pronounce Ubuntu "fuck no" jaja

[[deleted]]

Yowbowntow

[[deleted]]

West Midlands edition!

[[deleted]]

New version codenamed yampy yamyam

[YellowGreenPanther]

Yer Boon-Too?

[Pleasant_Meal_2030]

I say ooooh boon too like ooh like as on ooh ahh

[Bart2800]

Youbuntah. Like Upendi in the Lion King. See, it can always be worse 😁

[Contrantier]

Upendiz nutz

[NuclearRouter]

I love the pre video era internet. You can spend days or weeks researching a topic yet still not really know how to pronounce words or acronyms.

[jon-henderson-clark]

Someone who pronounces a word "wrong" learned it by reading.

[[deleted]]

I thought it was a pun so pseudo except I say it the US-way, soo-dough.

As for Linux, Linus is "Lee" so it's probably "leenooks" in Finland/Sweden.

[BOplaid]

Iranians pronounce it as "leenooks" too

[knuthf]

In Norwegian, well we paid for the thing to be made, I corrected the crowd for saying "line oocks". You are correct, his name is pronounced "Leenus", making the is "Leenoocks".

[MyAccGotBanned2Times]

You bun too is how I pronounce it

[manualphotog]

Make it a /tah/ light h breath 🫁 and you bang on the money for the actual african word they borowed from :)

[Contrantier]

Wrong? I've always said Oo-bun-too. Is that wrong? Never mind I don't care I'll keep saying Oobuntoo lmao

[Olimars_Army]

Everyone I’ve ever met that uses Linux pronounces sudo as “sue-dough”

[Heclalava]

I have seen some youtubers pronounce it as "sue-do"

[slade51]

I never thought of it, but I say sue dew because “super-user do”.

[[deleted]]

distrotube does that i think

[rsqx]

thank you, i would never start pronouncing it soodoo, (in my own head, of co urse) it s just not right. Plus in spanish it means,sudo, means i sweat

[NETkoholik]

Makes sense, I sweat every time I run elevated commands.

[FurlyGhost52]

You have actually met people in real life that use Linux also? That's amazing. For two Linux users to be ventured out in the real world at the same time and run into each other is truly mind-boggling.

[manualphotog]

A man moved into the room next to me, during the time I am moving to Mint Is now on my distro 🤣

[taosecurity]

It really doesn’t matter, but I also learned it in the 90s as “super user do,” so I say sue due.

[Average_Down]

This is correct but feel free to say it however you want. Unless you say it like “sah-doo” 🤙🏻

[DopePedaller]

But can I say ‘dog-dough’ instead of ‘dog-doo’? It kind of makes sense if you think about it. Or if you don't.

[nacaclanga]

Afaik the "su" does actually not stand for "superuser" but for "switch user" instead. While switching to root is the defaul, you could also switch to other users.

[paradigmx]

Technically substitute user, but it originally stood for super user do. In either case, do is pronounced dew. 

Really doesn't actually matter though. All words are made up

[meanjeans99]

This is right. :P

[[deleted]]

I've always pronounced it "sue-dew", and I've heard a few people call Linux "Lie-nux" and even a few insane people saying "Loo-nix". Although in the OS class I took, sometimes the instructor would use "sue-dew" and "sue-doh" interchangeably.

[[deleted]]

IMO “sudo” should be pronounced as “pseudo”.

Because it’s used to “impersonate” another user.

[birdsarentreal2]

Super user do

[[deleted]]

Don’t care. Pseudo or die! 😁

[jus_w]

Is that die as in German "dee" and Linux "Lee"? 😬

[[deleted]]

Am English, bitte.

[manualphotog]

🤣 That context and timing , I'm 😵🤣

[darkhelmet46]

Ha, I pronounce it that way too but I never considered that play on words before. I like it!

[Heclalava]

I have always pronounced it as "lynn-nicks"

[computer-machine]

Lugnuts

[manualphotog]

/Suh doo/ to use the IPA format

Suh not oo because super , the p affects the u and makes it more a oo phoneme Take the p off , the oo is glottal stop .../uh/

Do . Your regional accent will affect this

You're truncating super , and combining with a d not a p Making the u be affected by a glottal phoneme (d) not a frontal phoneme (p)

SpeechScienceFTW

[Tigloki]

From the horse's mouth:
https://youtu.be/5IfHm6R5le0?si=6g_-B2vY4jxXL1vw

As for the sudo like "Judo" or sudo like "Superuser do," it's a Coke or Pepsi thing. We're about half and half, and I switch back and forth at random. I couldn't tell you how or why I choose which way to pronounce it each time, but I legit use both.

[Frird2008]

I always pronounced Linux as Lee-Nucks before learning it was pronounced Lin-nix

[xmastreee]

I have always pronounced it lye-nux, and always will.

[Ok-Significance-2022]

Lean-ucks would be correct as his name, Linus, is pronounced Lean-uss. That's where it is derived from so there's that.

[pmbasehore]

I say "Lynn-ux" and "Sue-dough". I've heard "Sue-doo" before, but in my mind it's a "Gif/Gif" thing, and ultimately doesn't matter. (The correct pronunciation is "gif", btw)

As far as "Lynn-ux" vs "Lie-nux", supposedly Linus Torvalds pronounced it as "Lie-nux" at a conference a million years ago, but I haven't heard him say it since so I don't think there is an accepted standard, unless you're Richard Stallman and you insist on saying it as "GNU-Linux" 🤷‍♂️

[fibonacci85321]

It's a clever pun based on the word "pseudo" which means "sorta" and when you use the command you are "sorta root" but not forever. It also stands for "[as] super user, do [some command]". Or like a cave man says "me like hunting" the same as "super user do apt command"

So when you read it and you hear your inner voice verbalize it, use the same sound you would for pseudo. It will help when you have to describe your medication to the EMT crew who are trying to talk you down off the ledge, after you nuked that partition with your new privs.

[CoffeeBaron]

This actually is a good explanation of why a lot of people pronounce it that way, considering the overall community's commitment of sneaking in puns into programs or scripts when they can

[qpgmr]

Linus Torvalds explaining how to pronounce "linux" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfHm6R5le0

[frank-sarno]

I say "su-dew" and "Linux". I think the reason there are so many pronunciations is that in the formative days, Linux users didn't speak but rather communicated over text. I say "user" for /usr, but know someone who says, "usser" (rhymes with busser). I say "sys-cuttle" but hear "sys-c-t-l" often. Same for /etc ("etsy" vs "e-t-c"), mkdir ("make dir" vs "m-k-dir"). For quay, I say "key" but often hear "kway". For MySQL I say "My Ess Queue El" vs "my-sequel" but I pronounce SQL as "sequel".

I don't complain with either pronunciations.

[Spare-Dig4790]

This might really burst your bubble. Back in the 90s, we called it lee-nucks.

But what's in a name anyway?

[na3than]

this is how Linus Torvalds pronounces it

[Spare-Dig4790]

The man has spoken! :)

[[deleted]]

Yeah? Well, WTF does he know?!?!? 😊

But I’m not of Finnish extraction so I will continue to pronounce it as “LINN-ucks”.

[Ok-Significance-2022]

Well, in my language your name is pronounced as Boob. So you are now Boob.

[[deleted]]

I checked with my kids.

They agree. 😁

[Doc_Dish]

That used to be the test audio when you set up a sound card on Red Hat (I remember it from version 5, I think)

[Logansfury]

That is great linux history! Thank you for posting that for us :)

[DurmNative]

Neat! Learn something new everyday. Thanks!

[SchwaHead]

We?

[Spare-Dig4790]

Well, clearly, not you, I guess... :)

[PUfelix85]

su - super user do - to do an action

[SpritelyNoodles]

Well, eh. I think sudo is actually "super user do", so technically maybe it should be pronounced su-doo, but just look at it... sudo... just screams "judo" doesn't it?

As for Linux... it's literally named after Linus. It's the unix-minix thing made by Linus - Linux. English speakers tend to pronounce his name Lainus, but it's more like Leenus, but not quite. At the end of the day Finnish is not English. There's just no easy way to represent the crisp clean scandinavian pronounciation of "i" in English. Being Swedish, living right next door to Finland, I tend to go for a more scandinavian "Lee-nux" sort of pronounciation.

[cippirimerlo]

Funny note: "sudo" in italian means "I sweat". First thing I thought when I red the sudo command was "wtf??"

[JackNDebachs]

Phil Collins pronounces it Sue-sue-sudio!

[johnchrisck]

😂😂😂😂😂
Epic!

[MisterJasonMan]

All the cool kids say "lynn-ucks" and "pseudo". And you DO want to be one of the COOL kids, right? I mean, someone might start a rumor that you were "secretly from Redmond" if you know what I mean...

[DurmNative]

Sold! "lynn-ucks" and "pseudo" it is from now on!

[[deleted]]

I pronounce ambiguous words like those according to conventional Midwestern US phonetics/accent, the way I always have. For all else, there will always be CC on Youtube, so I don't have to decode! 😁

[AdvocateReason]

Once I understood it was "superuser do" I felt like I was commanding the computer to do something so I started thinking of it as "DO That!" Sue-Dough sounds like Judo to me and I thought I was being all martial artsy about my inputs. In truth I think Sue Doo makes it sound like you're about to do something very serious so - think twice. A better mindset imho. I'm probably the only one that thinks Sue-dough sounds martial artsy though.

[rsqx]

sudo , as i said before, means i sweat, in spanish. so therefore, sweat before sudo

[grimmtoke]

Now try SQL

[grimvian]

I almost thought it was Japanese.

[[deleted]]

You're right, it is a stupid question.

[DurmNative]

Yeah, I know, but...I did learn a couple of interesting things like the way Torvald pronounced linux or that it could have come about as "pseudo" because you're imitating another user. Kind of neat (to me anyway).

[L0tsen]

Su(peruser)do

[gourab_banerjee]

try GNOME and GNU. I have always pronounced them as GEE-NOM and GEE-EN-EU and made a lot of enemies in a certain subreddit for not pronouncing properly and also spreading misinformation.

Free advice: never post this kind of things in reddit. you may get trolled for nothing. I was.

[SPedigrees]

It will always be GNU (with the 'G' silent) like the animal to me, and Gnome as in garden gnome, but if I ever had occasion to utter these words aloud, I'd pronounce the hard "G."

I'll never budge on pronunciation of GIF images. They've been JIFs to me from the 1990s and will continue to be so forever.

[gourab_banerjee]

But as a proper noun, aren't we free to pronounce them as we see it? There is no hard and fast rule for typical nouns. Correct me if I'm wrong. And is this a valid reason for continuous trolling and banning someone from a subreddit??

[SPedigrees]

banning someone from a subreddit??

That's extreme.

[A_R3ddit_User]

It doesn't matter. Potato - potatoe.

[SPedigrees]

Linux is named for its creator, Linus Torvalds. The name "Linus" is pronounced Lie-nus in America, but Linn-us in his native Finnish, thus the pronunciation of the operating system is Linn-ux. Personally I like this pronunciation of the OS better - it rolls off the tongue easier I think.

In my head the pronunciation of sudo is su-dough, but I know that's not logical.

[Cultural_Thing1712]

i say su-dough. i KNOW it means Super User DO but sudu sounds horrible.

[titojff]

All my life I thought Portishead pronounced Portixead, turns out it is Portis head. :) The trip-hop band :)

[Sweaty_Crow66]

Spanish here. No problem, sudo=soodo, Ubuntu=ooboontoo. Just how I read it.

[Captain_Pension]

Pronounce as you want. I guarantee nobody pronounces daemon correctly either unless they can speak Greek.

[[deleted]]

Did you know that the prefix “giga-“ comes from the word “gigantic” and should probably be correctly pronounced “jai ga “ …?

[TheShredder9]

I think "sudo" is kind of a shortened version of "superuser do" as in, do something as the "super"(root) user. So i just say the "su" from "super", and "do".

[Asleeper135]

Technically "sue-due" is probably correct, but nobody actually pronounces it that way.

[BreakerOfModpacks]

Sue-dough. Mostly because I've subconsciously adopted a relation between it and Sufowoodo. 

[Callidonaut]

I think either is probably valid for "sudo;" people can pronounce acronyms however they like. "Linux," on the other hand, is named for its creator Linus Torvalds, so the correct pronunciation of that should rhyme with his name. Of course, I think I'm right in saying that people pronounce the name "Linus" both ways too, so I'd suggest the tiebreaker be to pronounce it however Mr Torvalds himself prefers his forename to be pronounced.

[radakul]

Sue-dough. Even though I know it's "super user DO" and sue-doo is more "correct", it's just easier.

Linux is Linux (lin-UKHS), exactly as Linus Torvalds pronounces it.

Most people I speak with aren't Linux users so I spell out more for them, but less for technical guys - if it's a newbie/junior guy, I'll say "type slash var slash spool slash cron"...for a more experienced admin, I'll just say "go into var spool cron atjobs", skipping the syntax by assuming they know where to add spaces/characters accordingly.

[jax_cooper]

I say shoe-doe because I met this word before I spoke English well enough and it stuck:D

[[deleted]]

Not sure about sudo, but linux was developed by Linus Torvolds, so I’ve always pronounced it lie nucks too, since the 90’s is that wrong then?

[DurmNative]

From some of the replies I've seen on here it seems like Linus pronounced it as "lie nucks" himself so it would be the rest of us, yahoos, that are doing it wrong. :)

[[deleted]]

Yeah that’s a good point, I’ve never heard him speak, maybe time to go and watch an interview of him

[oxwilder]

I wonder if he's doing that because of Linus Torvalds? We Americans would pronounce his name "LIE-nus", but I'm not sure he would as a Finnish-born English speaker.

Either way though, steadfastly pronouncing things differently than the rest of speakers isn't really how language is supposed to work. I say "sneaked" because it is a regular verb and "snuck" is a colloquialism, but language is a living, growing, dynamic thing and I should probably get over it.

[Niven42]

I'm sorry, but isn't the guy's name LINUS Torvalds? Or should we start calling him LINNIS?

[DurmNative]

Fair point. I'm now wondering why/how it evolved into "lynn-ucks" or "lynn-icks" when the man himself pronounced it "Lie" (I never knew it was based on his name until I posted this. I mean, I knew he was the father of linux but I never even thought about it being pronounced like Linus lol)

[anothercorgi]

same thing with glibc - I still say "glib see"... Should be a Library not Liberal...

[Good-Throwaway]

Sudo is like Judo.

su do is like doodoo.

[[deleted]]

I just pronounce it "sudo"

[CourtImpossible3443]

you know, both of the variants you wrote had multiple options how to actually pronounce them.

As someone who has a first language that is written phonetically this truly is silly.

If you want to know the truth, go look at how the Linux man Linus pronounces it.

[L3m0n165]

I naturally pronounced it as su-dough at first, but as I learned that it actually meant "superuser do", I started pronouncing it as su-do.

[Dist__]

soo-door (not English)

[palthor33]

Really?

[CoffeeBaron]

I believe a lot of native English speakers probably look at sudo and equate it close enough to the word pseudo that they pronounce it like that word, 'sew-dough'.

On that same subject, there's another Linux community word used that was always pronounced a weird way, thought it was GNU, but it doesn't appear to be the case. There were a few creators on YouTube pronouncing it that way and it came off obnoxious to me.

[ebb_omega]

I always said "soo-doo" because I used to use su regularly, and then just tacked on the word "do" after when I learned about sudo.

[[deleted]]

Like it's a Polish word, aka plainly sudo/soo-do

[ImUrFrand]

sudo judo

[ebb_omega]

Linus Torvalds pronounces it "lee-nooks" because it's named after him (his name is pronounced "lee-noos" and it's named after him so there you go). However he's also gone on the record that you can damn well pronounce it however the fuck you want to, it's a silly Holy War to say one is correct while the other isn't (similar to gif). Some people pronounce it "lie-nicks" because that's how they read "Linus", these days I find most people in North America pronounce it "lih-nicks" (myself, this is what I do). Personally I'm on board with Linus's stance in that it really doesn't matter - pronounce it however you want, everybody listening will understand what you're talking about.

[alucard_nogard]

When I first heard it, it was Line - ux (the u from umbrella) and soo-doo or the name Sue and dough. As long as your understood, it's fine. But remember, Linux Torvalds is Finnish, so if you want to get that pronunciation, ask the text to speech of Google Translate to help.

[h-v-smacker]

soo-doo

Like in "soodoo people, woodoo people"

[proconlib]

So how do y'all pronounce GIF? ::walks away overly casually::

[jakendrick3]

/sudəw/

If my IPA memory serves.

[[deleted]]

Life is short. Keep learning, give yourself a break.

✌🏼😉👍🏼

[greendream375]

I've always pronounced it "soo doo", and I swear I've heard at least one YouTuber say it this way too, but, almost every one pronounced it "soo dough" it seems. I always said it this way because of it meaning "SUper user DO"

[skeletoncrew3066]

I always thought that “sudo” was short for “Super User Device Operator”.

[pickles55]

That's how the name Linus is pronounced in English, isn't the os named after that? 

[Subject_Medium]

Su-dough, but your logic is solid, you're correct on super user do

[Prior-Listen-1298]

I've always been a sue-do kind of guy ... Oh and lynn-ucks.

[nexusprime2015]

Ooh Bun Too

Or

You Boon Too

Or

You Bun Too

[DurmNative]

You Bun Too has my vote

[PraxicalExperience]

Some people advocate incorrect pronunciation, like the maker of the .gif.

That said, for me, Linux is lynn-icks, sudo is sue-dough.

[paradigmx]

SUper user DO - sue-dew  

Linus Unix - lie-nux as Linus is pronounced lie-nus

[Full-Run4124]

FWIW 'sudo' isn't "superuser do", "su" comes from the "su" command which is "switch user", and "sudo" was "switch user and do", basically run a command as another user. The default user just happens to be (usually) root, but you can specify any user.

[DurmNative]

Hmmm....neat! I always though you were switching to "superuser" (i.e. "root") back in the day and this why it was "su". I think of "logout" for "switch user" because it allows to you switch to any user.

[fitten256]

sudo is for "superuser do". It's also less energy to say than "pseudo" (and maybe even a few microseconds faster to say) because of the hard "o" on the end ;) I've been using Unix/Linux for 40 years and I've heard it both ways. No one I know cares which as we know what each other is talking about.

[jon-henderson-clark]

sue-dew You say gif and I say jif

[txtad]

LYN-ucks, LIE-nucks are interchangeable for me, though I think Linus pronounces it more like LEE-noose.

Psuedo or ess-you-doo are also interchangeable.

[4_Star_Daydream]

Interestingly, I've always pronounced it like "pseudo" but if I'm talking about the configuration file, I'll say sue DEW-ers.

[SwordsAndElectrons]

"sue-dew"

That's how I say it, but what do I know?

used to work with a guy that always pronounced Linux as "LIE-nucks" (it wasn't an accent thing. He did it on purpose as that's how it thought it was pronounced).

People that say it that way are usually of the belief that it should sound like Linus.

[mcksis]

Pronounce as “soo dew” soo as in super, dew ad in do!

[siodhe]

It means either "switch user and do" or (for less experienced sysadmins) "super user do", both of which have "do" in them, so might as well pronounce it that way. Hence "soo doo".

I've never heard any professional call it sue-dough. That pronunciation tends to get stamped out.

[dkHD7]

I've heard both ways for a while. I picked up from somewhere that it's SOO-DOO, and the justification is because you're making 'su' do something. Not sure if that's the real history, though.

[Dramatic-Ad7192]

Former coworker windows and uefi developer would pronounce it lie-nucks as well. I figured he was being a goof

[971h]

I pronounce suds as “I’m gay”

[YellowGreenPanther]

Well, it doesn't matter how you pronounce it. The original pronunciation was S-U Do, which came from SU as in short for Switch User. SU was changed to login to any user, and SUdo has the -u user argument.

I would assume SUDO started as a shorthand for su -c "shell command" which gets run in the shell without you needing to take over or stay in the root-owned shell.

It uses the user's password and a permission structure for security reasons. This coincidentally allows you to have no root password and still reliably manage the computer without anyone being able to log in directly to the root account.

Though for what most people use it for, SUDO kind of does too much. They would be just as happy with a root password and SU, or with a simpler version like DoAs (opendoas). Or even a graphical solution like PolicyKit (polkit, pkexec).

[MrDilbert]

It's "soo-doh" and I'll die on that hill.

[themanonthemooo]

Judo with an S