Pronunciation of "www" - English Pronunciation

English Pronunciation

In standard English pronunciation, www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the names of the letters (/ˈdʌbəl.juː ˈdʌbəl.juː ˈdʌbəl.juː/ or double-u double-u double-u). However, in colloquial speech the name of the letter W is sometimes shortened. In some parts of the United states, the l is often dropped and the u reduced, for /ˈdʌbəjə ˈdʌbəjə ˈdʌbəjə/, whereas in the Southern United States W is reduced to two-syllables, /ˈdʌbjə ˈdʌbjə ˈdʌbjə/. The latter pronunciation is often used by people further north who normally have a three-syllable pronunciation for a single letter W. By late 2010, in the midwest, the colloquialism "wubba wubba wubba" had come into common use.

In New Zealand, a dub-dub-dub variant is widely accepted; for example its use in television advertisements appears to be standard. Also commonly used is all the double-Us.

An abbreviation W3, /ˈdʌbəl juː ˈkjuːbd/ ("double-u cubed"), is inspired from mathematical notation for exponentiation (W raised to the third power). Many of the original papers describing the World Wide Web abbreviated it this way, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was named according to this early usage. The original W3C logo had a superscript 3 and the consortium's domain name is still www.w3.org.