World Wide Web

:For the world's first web browser, see WorldWideWeb.

Pronunciation of "www"

Most English-speaking people pronounce the 9-syllable letter sequence www used in some domain names for websites as "double U, double U, double U" despite shorter options like "triple double U" being available.

Related Topics:
English - Syllable

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Some languages do not have the letter w in their alphabet (for example, Italian), which leads some people to pronounce www as "vou, vou, vou." In some languages (such as Czech and Finnish) the w is substituted by a v, so Czechs pronounce www as "veh, veh, veh" rather than the correct but much longer pronunciation "dvojité veh, dvojité veh, dvojité veh;" the same applies to Finnish, where the correct pronounciation would be "kaksoisvee, kaksoisvee, kaksoisvee." Several other languages (e.g. German, Dutch etc.) simply pronounce the letter W as a single syllable, so this problem doesn't occur.

Related Topics:
Italian - Czech - Finnish - German - Dutch - Letter W

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Depending on how the domain and web server are set up, a www website can often be accessed without entering the "www.", as long as the ".com" or other appropriate top-level domain is appended. Even this is not always necessary as some browsers will automatically try adding "www." and ".com" to typed URIs if a web page isn't found without them.

Related Topics:
Web server - Top-level domain

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In English pronunciation, saying the full words "World Wide Web" takes one-third as many syllables as saying the initialism "www". According to Berners-Lee, others mentioned this fact as a reason to choose a different name, but he persisted.

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