The History of The Name and Pronouncation
When ZyXEL unveiled its first chip-design (ZyXEL was originally a modem-chip design company) back in the late 1980s, the company only had a Chinese name (pronounced Her-Chin = "people work together very hard"). So it had to come up with an English name for a trade show in Asia. The original idea was ZyTEL ("Zy" means nothing, "TEL" for telecommunications). The problem was that someone already had this name announced for the show. So they played around with the letters and came up with ZyXEL instead.
The name does not actually mean anything, although some people claim "XEL" is a word-play on "excellence".
The next challenge was how to pronounce it (everybody in the company was Chinese at that time).
So they fed the name into an old speech synthesizer (reportedly it was an Amiga). And the synthesizer pronounced it "Zai-Cell".
Read more about this topic: Zy XEL
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