How Do You Pronounce “Qiskit?”

Brian N. Siegelwax
3 min readDec 1, 2021

This Is A True Story

The question was asked on Twitter on February 27, 2020, “what’s the official pronunciation of Qiskit?” If you follow the link to the thread on Twitter, you’ll find that there was, in fact, no official pronunciation at that time. Many IBMers, as well as others, responded with their personal preferences, but preferences was all they were. The participation of IBM’s VP of Quantum Computing, Dr. Jay Gambetta, confirmed that none of those contributions were official.

https://twitter.com/Agent_ANAKIN/status/1233013317670592512

In the order they were originally recorded, there were at least six unofficial pronunciations:

  1. kwiss-kit
  2. kiss-kit
  3. kizz-kit
  4. quiz-kit
  5. cheese-kit
  6. cue-skit

Although some pronunciations were offered multiple times, here’s a semi-random sampling:

kwiss-kit

https://twitter.com/abe_asfaw/status/1232889428269465601

kiss-kit

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Brian N. Siegelwax
Brian N. Siegelwax

Written by Brian N. Siegelwax

The least qualified person in quantum.

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