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by technofiend 2411 days ago
How to pronounce Quay: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2018/04/cay-key-quay.html

Edit: I called it Kway myself and googled it after getting puzzled looks from my UK peers. The referenced article says "key" is the older pronunciation but either is acceptable.

5 comments

I've always pronounced it "kway" but so long as its being used, I'm fine with any of the pronunciations :)

Disclaimer: Named, cofounded, and now engineering lead of Quay

The "most correct" pronunciation of Quay is "key", as that link says, but the CoreOS team always pronounced it "kway".

(I assume this has carried through to Red Hat.)

I asked Brandon Phillips (Then CoreOS CTO) on a call how they said it. He was quite frank it was pronounced "kway" and not "key", much to the chagrin of our Aussie coworker who still calls it "key". I've called it "kway" since.
Yes, the team calls it kway.

However, when I worked at SUSE a running joke was: as long as you love using it we don't care how you pronounce it.

"You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis & Cathy Lee; I don't care! Just as long as you call me" - @RuPaul
RuPaul cribbed that one from Bill Saluga's Raymond J. Johnson Jr. character. Saluga basically made an entire career out of this stupid spiel.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Saluga

Does he also visit the Florida Kways?
Florida's cay/quays/keys are just called Keys (presumably to short circuit this madness): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Keys
Kway makes more intuitive sense to me; it's like the word quail.
But this is also a word in common usage, and it already has a pronunciation: "key".

English is not a good place to go if you are looking for intuitive pronunciation.

Nor consistency of pronunciation. Schedule / School is another good one if you’re in the UK.
Merriam-Webster lists ˈkwā as valid, and Cambridge lists kweɪ under an 'American Dictionary' subsection.
I'm from the UK and when I first moved to London I pronounced Surrey Quays Surrey Kways until I was corrected, I pronounced Torquay and Newquay correctly but it never occurred to me to pronounce Surrey Kways Surrey Quays.
I live in a housing development with Quay in the name. Very quickly learned that "KEE"/"KEY" is that only thing that won't get you sideways glances
I think its "kway" as well. It sounds more soothing.