Pronouncing Gyros

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Tui Bui. I’m calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

I wanted to ask how to pronounce the Greek word G-Y-R-O.

Oh boy, you mean the sandwich.

Yes.

The meat on a pita with some yogurt sauce and cucumbers and tomatoes and onions, right?

Yes, that’s it.

And how do you say it?

Well, I used to say gyro, but I had a TA one time from Greece, and she said it was hyro.

And I’ve heard it been pronounced gyro and gyro, and I just really want to know.

So the sandwich, G-Y-R-O.

And there we start with the problems in the first place, Tui, which is not everyone agrees that that’s how you should spell it.

Well, everyone agrees that’s how you spell it.

That’s how you say it.

Well, no, in your world, they may agree how you spell it.

What I’m saying is that the people who are steadfast in believing that the singular form ends in an S, and that to take that S off to make a singular is incorrect.

Because the word comes from Greek and it means turning.

And it’s in its iros to mean a turning.

That’s the Greek pronunciation.

And it does have an S.

And so you will get people, including some Greeks, and of course many Americans who believe this to be true, that that’s the way to do it.

But the whole problem with this whole thing is that nobody, as you say, knows how to pronounce the thing.

Even Greek Americans, Greeks, Greeks themselves who I’ve talked to, people who work in restaurants and serve this food, they give me different answers.

I’ve been asking about this for years.

This is why I always order the Spanakopita.

Just forget the sandwiches.

That totally works.

And so here’s the thing.

In 1971, the New York Times ran an article about this sandwich.

And notice I’m avoiding saying the word for the moment, right?

The sandwich, the G-Y-R-O.

And in there, they wrote a phonetic pronunciation of the word.

And they spelled it, all lowercase letters, Y-E-A-R hyphen O-H, gyro.

And that’s how they said it was pronounced.

Now, the problem with that is, Thuy, in 2009, the New York Times also wrote an article about the sandwiches.

And they had a different pronunciation.

And they spelled it capital Y, capital E, capital E, hyphen, lowercase r, lowercase o, lowercase s.

Yeros.

And so in this almost 40 years, in this 38 years between these two articles in the New York Times, something has happened.

And I think what’s happened here is that there’s been kind of a hyper correction, as we call it.

People have decided to try to hearken back to the original Greek in order to say, oh, this must be the authentic way to pronounce this word.

And you know what about that?

You want to hear something about that?

It’s a load of hooey.

Seriously.

I’m going to get to your answer.

And you just want to know how to pronounce this, right?

There are four pronunciations given in the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you ask, as you’ve done, and you’ve reported exactly what I found to be true, if you say to people, how do you pronounce this word?

If they know that that’s what you’re after, they try to say it in the most authentic way they think it could possibly be real.

They try to make it very foreign sounding or what they imagine to be very Greek sounding.

Right, Martha? This is totally what they do.

Oh, sure.

But you know what?

If you listen to them order the food in the restaurants, it’s completely the same people.

It’s a completely different word in their mouths.

And I’ve called people on it, and they deny that they pronounced it differently.

I’m like, no, you said something else the other day when we talked about this, and now when you’ve ordered the food, you say, you know, here’s the thing.

Here’s the bottom line.

One, most people say gyro or gyro.

Two, the singular is unquestionably G-Y-R-O.

And the reason is because this is an American food.

I know it’s no great feat to take meat and put it on bread, and it’s very much like a donut kebab, and people always bring that up.

But this particular construction and this particular food by this particular name is American.

So it’s an American word.

And I know Americans have a tendency to brutalize, sometimes gently, but brutalize foreign words when they appear in our language.

But this word is singular, G-Y-R-O, gyro, however you want to say it.

The plural, of course, is gyro, gyro, gyros or gyros, however you want to say it.

And then the fourth thing is yummy.

I don’t really care.

Just give me some more tzatziki sauce and I’ll take whatever you got there.

So it’s good food.

Anyway, so that’s, well, you set me off here.

So if I go to Greece, Grant, I’m not going to find these sandwiches?

No, you’ll find different sandwiches.

Sometimes, even if you go down to the Palaka, if you go to one of the places in Athens where they serve a lot of food to tourists, you’re going to find food that looks like this, but it’s not going to have this name.

Thank you so much.

Does that work for you?

I finally know how to say it.

Yes, yes.

Next time somebody asks me, I will tell them that I was on A Way with Words, and they told me how to say it correctly.

That’s right.

Yes.

Gyro or gyro, you’re okay.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you want to weigh in on the gyro versus gyro versus gyro, you can give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.