To "Giga" or to "Jiga"? The Curious Case of the Prefix‘s Split Personality

As a tech geek and data analyst, prefixes matter to me. And one of the most polarizing debates in my circles is how to pronounce the mighty "giga" – as a hard "g" or soft "j"? In this deep dive, I‘ll unravel the curious case of this split personality prefix. Grab your gigahertz processor and buckle up!

In the Beginning, There Was "Gigas"

Let‘s start at the very beginning – the Greek root. The word "giga" comes from the Greek "gigas" meaning "giant". In ancient Greek, the "g" was pronounced as a plosive /g/ sound, similar to the hard "g" in "get".

The first known use of giga as a prefix was in 1897, when German engineer Werner von Siemens proposed "gigant" as a unit multiplier for one billion. This stemmed from the need for larger prefixes to describe the massive currents and voltages of modern electrical infrastructure.

As Greek scholar Plutarch wrote, "The race of giants is extinct, they left behind only their name attached to large things." And so "gigas" became the go-to suffix for orders of magnitude far greater than humanity.

The Soft "G" Creeps In

In the early 20th century, the field of electronics began using "giga" prefixes like gigaherz (GHz) and gigawatt (GW). German engineering pronunciation led to these being initially pronounced as "jigahertz" and "jigawatt".

As pioneering electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming wrote in 1911‘s Principles of Electric Wave Telegraphy:

"The new prefix giga, meaning a thousand million, is now frequently used by electricians. Thus a million million cycles per second is termed a gigacycle."

This soft "j" sound was likely an attempt to approximate the plosive greek "gamma", as well as distinguish it from the hard-g "giga" meaning one billion specifically.

And so the divergence began, with engineers and academics using the soft sound, while business/computing adopted the hard sound.

Gigawatts Galore! Back to the Future and the Great "G" Debate

Perhaps the most iconic usage of the soft "j" pronunciation was in the 1985 classic Back to the Future. Fans vividly remember Doc Brown emphasizing the "jigawatts" needed to power his time machine.

This thrust the old-school engineering term into mainstream pop culture. And the internet hasn‘t stopped arguing about it since!

In 2008, writer John Wells dug into the debate around the Back to the Future quote:

"People writing about Back to the Future frequently spell the pronunciation of the prefix giga- that Doc Brown uses as jigowatt, jigawatt, or jiggawatt, or even jigga-watt … All of these, however, seem to be efforts to spell a sound that simply has no standard spelling in English."

Wells makes an excellent point – English spelling does not easily capture the soft g sound. Unfortunately for sticklers, the name stuck and "jigawatt" remains entrenched in the public consciousness.

The Hard "G" Bytes Back

In the 1990s, as personal computing entered the mainstream, the pronunciation shifted back towards the hard "g" sound.

The driving force was the explosive growth of data storage. As disk drive capacities grew, new prefixes were needed to denote the scale. The term "gigabyte" was born, using the hard "g" sound based on "billion".

As microprocessors got faster, their clock speeds similarly shot up from megahertz into gigahertz. Again cementing the hard "g" in tech terminology.

Linguistics professor Mark Liberman remarked on this phenomenon:

"The pronunciation of giga- with a hard g seems to have emerged along with the spread of the word gigabyte in the early 1980s."

tbd…