WWW is an initialism for World Wide Web. In English, WWW is the longest possible three-letter abbreviation when spoken, requiring six to nine syllables, depending on how it is pronounced, whereas the twelve letters in "World Wide Web" are pronounced with three syllables. The English writerDouglas Adams once quipped: Tim Berners-Lee rejected suggestions to change the World Wide Web name over pronunciation issues, arguing that this peculiar feature of the name would make it memorable. As his invention gradually gained ubiquity, it came to be called simply the Web.
In Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Polish and other languages, this problem doesn't occur because the letter W is already uttered as a single syllable. In some languages, such as Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish it is common practice to say "ve" instead of "dobbelt-ve" in abbreviations, so "www" becomes "ve, ve, ve". This is also used by Romanian, Serbian, etc. In Danish, it is also usual to say "tre gange dobbelt-ve". In many languages which give the letter W a name that translates to "double V", each w is substituted by a v, so www is shortened to "vvv" instead. Another practice is to use a numeric shortcut that translates w-w-w as triple W.
"double vé, double vé, double vé" in French. Most French speakersprefer the "3w" form, pronounced "trois doubles-vés" or – less frequently – "triple double-vé". Some Belgians tend to use the Dutch pronunciation.
"vé, vé, vé" in Hungarian Sometimes "tripladuplavé" can be heard, too.
"tvöfalt vaff, tvöfalt vaff, tvöfalt vaff" or "vaff, vaff, vaff" in Icelandic
"dupult ve, dupult ve, dupult ve" or "ve, ve, ve" in Faroese. Double-u is not part of the Faroese alphabet and is normally substituted by using V in its stead, leading to the latter, shorter pronunciation.
"vu vu vu" in Italian, despite being technically incorrect.
"вэ-вэ-вэ" in Russian. It may be heard in the "WWW" song by the bandLeningrad. However, the official pronunciation is "тройное дабл-ю"
"ве-ве-ве" in Serbian. Another frequently used way to pronounce it is в-в-в without any vowels. Correct, but used less often, is "duplove-duplove-duplove".
In Spanish, "3w" can be either "triple doble v", "triple doble u", "uve doble uve doble uve doble", "tres uve dobles", "triple uve doble", "doble u, doble u, doble u", "ve doble, ve doble, ve doble", "doble ve, doble ve, doble ve" or "tres uve dobles".
"dabıl yu, dabıl yu, dabıl yu" or "çift ve, çift ve, çift ve" or "ve ve ve" in Turkish
In Welsh, the standard pronunciation is "w-driphlyg" – as w is a vowel in Welsh, it is pronounced as 'oo', so the acronym's name is only 3 syllables long.
