Question: How Do You Pronounce "URL"?
Question: How Do You Pronounce "URL"? I’m confused – I’ve heard people say "earls" and "you are ells" when they’re talking about URLs. What’s the proper way to pronounce URL?
Answer: Trying to get us into trouble from the very beginning, eh? As the song goes, "You say tomato, I say tomahto." With that in mind, here’s our take on the pronunciation of URL. We all say "you are ell." We’ve noticed that people from the east coast of the U.S. are more likely to say "earl" than people from the west coast. When we had lunch with one of the people who helped develop the Web at CERN in Switzerland, he said "you are ell" (with a nice accent, admittedly). Finally, we think "earl" sounds, well, churlish. A very few people pronounce it "ural," like the mountains, but we suspect the effects of too much vodka.