Analyze -v

Interrupt request levels are a fundamental Windows concept. We all know what they are (and if not we should) and interact with them every day, but do we know how to pronounce their acronym “IRQLs”?

Much like most of these terms, you’ll find a few alternate pronounciations. The one that I use is:

Urk wull

With short u sounds.

An alternate pronounciation that you’ll sometimes hear is:

Urkel

(An homage to Steve?)

Lastly, there’s the obvious pronounciation of just sounding out the letters:

I R Q L

Though what fun is that?

Everyone loves the the Windows Kernel Debugger WinDBG, but how do you pronounce it when you’re talking about it? There are, in fact, two commonly accepted pronounciations:

Win D-B-G

And:

Wind bag

I exclusively use the latter as it rolls off of the tongue a bit better in my opinion.

Bonus Material: Driver Speak Spelling Bee

WinDBG also has the distinction of having two spellings: WinDBG and WinDbg. WinDbg appears to be the “correct” spelling, as it is how the name appears in the application’s title bar. However, for no good reason other than asthetics I prefer WinDBG, so that’s what I use.

I’m going to start a new mini-post series called Driver Speak. In this series I’m going to write posts that describe how to pronounce all those strange words and acronyms you’ll come across in your driver writing. First up will be everyone’s favorite kernel debugger, “WinDBG.”