Pronouncing DOGE
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Coby L. wrote to ask why DOGE is pronounced with a final /ʒ/ rather than a final /dʒ/.
The Department Of Government Efficiency is clearly a backronym of the Doge meme, which references a Shiba Inu dog. According to Wikipedia, the meme can be pronounced /doʊʒ/ or /doʊdʒ/ or /doʊɡ/, though all I've heard from the media is /doʊʒ/. I guess Coby's experience is similar, hence the question. Wikipedia says that the memetic cryptocurrency Dogecoin is pronounced either /doʊʒkɔɪn/ or /doʊdʒkɔɪn/, but apparently not /doʊgkɔɪn/.
I've heard pronunciations evoking the words "doggie" and "dodgy", suggested for DOGE as jokes.
Anyhow, the /doʊʒ/ or /doʊdʒ/ pronunciations are presumably influenced by the title "Doge", glossed by the OED as
The title given to the holder of the highest civil office of the republic of Venice from the 7th cent. until the Napoleonic conquest of 1797, and to an analogous magistrate in the republic of Genoa from the 14th cent. till 1797.
The OED's pronunciation field suggests that the U.S. version is what Coby and I have been hearing, while the British version could also end in /dʒ/:
Here are the corresponding audio files:
| British English | U.S. English |
The original meme-spelling (from 2010) was apparently supposed to be a naive mistake.
Update: Know You Meme, referenced by Joe in the comments, cites this Homestar Runner clip from 6/24/2005, where the "D O G E" spelling for "dog" and the /doʊʒ/ pronunciation both appear:
Robin Melnick said,
March 1, 2025 @ 12:54 pm
A fellow linguist has suggested to me that, clearly, it should be pronounced /dɑdʒi/ ("dodgy"). Yep, works for me.
Chris Button said,
March 1, 2025 @ 6:04 pm
I think it's the old hoping/hopping spelliing distinction.
The /oʊ/ sound is mandated by the single consonant after the vowel, and hence /ʒ/. Two consonants after the vowel gives you /ɑ/ and /dʒ/ as "dodge". Sure the "d" denotes the affricate, but it's the double consonant ("d" or otherwise) that actually dictates the vowel sound through the spelling.
Jenny Chu said,
March 1, 2025 @ 6:25 pm
I always wondered if it had anything to do with the old Italian aristocrat meaning of the word.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:05 pm
Wiktionary suggests that /doʊʒ/ and /doʊdʒ/ are both extant as AmEng pronunciations of the Venetian-dignitary sense. The Venetian-dignitary sense is one of those words that I've seen plenty of times in writing but can't recall having heard said aloud, so I have no particularly useful intuitions, other than thinking it's probably a trap to assume AmEng must follow the standard Italian pronunciation. And of course I'm tempted to use my extremely fronted grew-up-near-Philadelphia GOAT vowel which is not really adequately summed up by /oʊ/.
Beyond Tuscan-based standard Italian, the actual Venetian word for the office is supposedly (the internet tells me) doxe, sometimes spelled doze, which latter spelling apparently obscures the etymology but better represents the pronunciation.
Not a naive speaker said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:17 pm
Danny Kaye in the movie Court Jester has this dialogue with Cecil Parker about the doge and the duke and the duchess etc.
Look, listen and laugh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_lAFDbnMLA
Joe said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:22 pm
I don't think most Americans know about the Most Serene Republic of Venice, but there does seem to be a mentality of hyperforeignization, assuming the most exotic pronunciation must be the correct one. Compare the J in "Beijing".
The exhaustive resource Know Your Meme has more detail than Wikipedia and actually attributes the spread of "doge", in April 2012, to a viral audio file of a computer voice reading the text out loud – so the meme has had a certain pronunciation from the beginning! Except I can't figure out how to access the audio file and find out which.
AntC said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:26 pm
@JWB The Venetian-dignitary sense is one of those words that I've seen plenty of times in writing but can't recall having heard said aloud, … [ditto for me]
actual Venetian word for the office is supposedly (the internet tells me) doxe, sometimes spelled doze,
The spelling doesn't help much with the pronunciation, although presumably confirms two syllables. Italian wiktionary gives IPA /ˈdɔd͡ʒe/. Plural spelled 'dogi' if we ever need to talk about multiple heads of state (for example getting collectively p***ed off).
I agree with @Robin: close enough to 'dodgy'.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 1, 2025 @ 7:44 pm
@AntC: Venice wasn't the only Italian republic that had a doge back in the day. Genoa had one too, and presumably there were Genoan-Venetian diplomatic interactions that might have required the plural to describe.
Trevor Stone said,
March 2, 2025 @ 2:13 am
For years I've been baffled why people apply the English "silent e makes a long vowel" rule to "doge" as it refers to the shiba inu meme.
The meme came out of the animal meme lolspeak of the 'naughties. The conceit of lolspeak was that animals knew English, but were still learning to spell and hadn't yet mastered irregular grammar. The lolcat that launched a million memes was "I can has cheezburger?" which shows that the cat both uses phonetic spelling (why use a silent e for "cheese" when there's a perfectly good letter "z"; I've also seen people write "haz" for "has" since it's a hard consonant) and didn't have full command of verb conjugation ("I can has" rather than "can I have"). If you imagine yourself spelling like a first or second grader, you can probably write good lolspeak.
Pronouncing "doge" as /doʊdʒ/ is something someone would do when encountering an unknown word after they've generalized silent-e rules, probably several years into reading progression. But this isn't an obscure word in a European history book. It's a word on a picture of a dog surrounded by other lolspeak. So to me it's always been obvious that the word is _referring to the dog_, and should therefore be pronounced with a hard "g", probably the same or similar to "doggie", by the same process that lolcats would write "kitteh" rather than "kitty" on their memes.
I couldn't think of any other English words with a "-oge" ending where the o becomes long and the g becomes soft because of the e. `grep 'oge$' /usr/share/dict/words` finds only 17 including "doge". The only other one I've heard pronounced in conversation is "scrooge", which doesn't have a normal "o" vowel. I've seen "loge" written on occasion (perhaps only in collegiate contexts?), and everything else comes across to me as pretentious borrowings from French. No English-speaking first-grader/meme-animal is going to produce an /oʊdʒ/-ending word, so by far the simplest explanation is that the dog in the picture is trying to spell a word with a stem that's pronounced like "dog".
AntC said,
March 2, 2025 @ 7:11 am
For years I've been baffled why people apply the English "silent e makes a long vowel" rule to "doge" as it refers to the shiba inu meme.
Until this year, 'doge' to me meant only the the Italian dignitary sense (as @JWB points out not only in Venice, but the Doge's palace in Venice is the only one I've visited). Wiktionary tells me English acquired the word from French; they're the ones who clipped it to single-syllable; though no doubt it was convenient that e muet conformed with English's silent-e rule.
I am baffled why you would accuse me of knowing what is 'shiba inu'.
So (Italian) 'Doge' is by no means an obscure word for me. It's a still-living part of Europe. I have seen no picture of a dog; I can guess what laugh-out-loud-speak might be, but I have no familiarity with whatever you're trying to explain; why do you think English speakers in general would?
(Also be careful accusing people borrowing from French of being "pretentious". I think you'll find rather a lot of the words in your own post are so borrowed. I'll refrain from expressing an opinion on those borrowing Japanese memes.)
Andreas Johansson said,
March 2, 2025 @ 9:00 am
I've been mentally pronouncing it like "dodge", though I couldn't tell you precisely why. I've been aware that it derived from a meme, but not that said meme involved an animal that could conceivably me misspelled as "doge".
I don't think I've ever had occasion to pronounce the Italian title in English. I'd probably guessed at something like ['dɔ:dʒi:] if it'd come up.
The Venetian pronunciation of the title is/ˈdo.ze/ acc'd Wiktionary,
Philip Taylor said,
March 2, 2025 @ 11:13 am
I know it only as /doʊdʒ/, which the LPD recognises, although it offers /dəʊdʒ/ as the preferred form with /dəʊʒ/ as a less-preferred/common alternative.
Coby said,
March 2, 2025 @ 12:21 pm
Rick Steves, in his Venice audiotour, clearly says /doʊdʒɛs pæləs/ for "Doge's Palace". In fact, there are plenty of "how to pronounce doge" (in reference to Venice) pages found on the Web, and all the ones I clicked on agree with Steves.
SlideSF said,
March 2, 2025 @ 1:23 pm
I had an art history professor a-way back in the 70s, who when discussing Bellini's portrait of the Doge Loredan, pronounced it like Dough-Jay. I have never been to Venice, and having since only encountered the word in writing (until recently!), that pronunciation has stuck with me. When the meme came about, and later the "government efficiency" agency, I continued to pronounce it that way, and if corrected I would explain that I preferred to pronounce it like the leaders of Venice. I have been chagrined to realize my "cleverness" was merely ignorance.