At this point I can’t remember if the first time I heard of SQL was in reading and I just read it as an acronym or if it was audio/visual and that’s how the person said it… Sadly, it’s a mystery I’ll never know the answer to.
In French, we just pronounce it as three letters, so I was very confused at first when my English-speaking colleagues were referring to sequels of apparently nothing.
Eye tee oh oh ell eye kay ee tee oh pee are oh en oh you en see ee ee at see aitch ell eye tee tee ee are bee ee see ay you see ee eye tee oh oh ay em ay aitch you em ay en
I like to use the non-acronym name, so that I can say: "Structured Query Language. Or, with the JSON field type, more like UNSTRUCTURED query language!" And then I laugh like a maniac for 5 minutes while the other people in the line at Wendy's give me weird looks.
I also have heard Squirrel, the first time I ever heard of SQL. It was in a webinar info session for just a very superficial top-level type of understanding, really intended for nothing more than to acquaint first-tier support staff with technical terms and concepts. "SQL stands for Structured Query Language. For short, we can call it 'sequel' or 'squirrel'." (Cue stupid clip-art graphic of a buck-toothed smiling squirrel on a tree branch, holding an acorn, because what's a webinar without insipid mnemonics?) That sort of thing.
I grokked the use of 'sequel', because the letter sequence S-Q-L is exactly that word, sans vowels, and even if schwas are substituted for the vowels, the pronunciation doesn't change much.
But for 'squirrel' I had to imagine that they were taking the R from 'queRy' and injecting it to make SQL into SQrL for the sake of a cute memory device that would resonate with people who weren't expected to have any interest deeper than a front-line customer service drone.
I'd be curious if "Squirrel" originated with the SQuirreL client. The only time I've heard someone call SQL "squirrel" was because they were using SQL interchangeably with the client.
I had a project manager back in 2008 who pronounced SQL "skwall." I heard "My Skwall" and "Skwall Server" so many times. We all said "S Q L." No one ever corrected him.
I've always pronounced it "sequel", but ever since I attended a talk by the authors of PHP and MySQL Web Programming, and they pronounced it Ess-Cue-Ell I've been second guessing myself.
Some are more established than others. The one with the highest levels of agreement I've ever encountered, is SCSI, which pretty much everyone in-the-know pronounce "scuzzy".
If I am going to believe random articles I found on the internet (and, of course, I am), the reason is because SQL was originally called SEQUEL until the creators ran into a trademark issue.. They changed it to SQL, but us old timers just kept calling it the old thing. Something about old dogs and new tricks.