The original founders of Skype were Scandinavians – Janus Friis from Denmark and Niklas Zennstrom from Sweden. However the brains behind it were the Estonians Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. They developed the notoriously famous Kazaa peer to peer file-sharing program, which was released in 2000. Within a very short period, it became the most downloaded program on the Internet. It got the founders thinking, “So this is what it feels like to have half of the world’s Internet traffic go through your software”.
Soon after, the Kazaa owners were sued for enabling and encouraging piracy. They had not negotiated with the US media distribution companies. The logical result was to find a legal outlet for their P2P technology. And so the Skype idea was born in the middle of 2002.
Skype is a major symbol of the online chat revolution. It was not the first service to allow people to make voice calls over the internet. But its peer to peer technology and user friendliness gave it an edge. As the number of the users skyrocketed, Microsoft acquired the application back in 2011. Now Skype reports nearly 5 million active users today.
But how does one pronounce Skype? There are many different rumours and suggestions about how the word Skype originated. Not surprisingly with its Northern Europe roots this included Old Norse roots. Or does Skype rhyme with hype, pipe, type etc. The officially accepted origin of the Skype name is in the peer to peer technology – sky peer-to-peer, with sky being the medium for the information.
Sky peer-to-peer was shortened to Skyper, as documented by founder’s official website’s publication back in 2002, “The company will launch Skyper 1.0 during 2003. In short: Stay tuned for the next phenomenon from the people who brought you KaZaA.”
As the story suggests most of the domains associated with Skyper were not available back in 2002. So a marketing decision was made and the name was shortened to Skype.
The majority of the English-speaking world is accustomed to the /skaɪp/ pronunciation. Yet most of the rest are pronouncing the word ‘Skype‘ as /ˈskaɪpi/ (which makes more sense considering the word origin – sky-peer and the Voice over IP technology behind it – Sky-IP).
Isn’t it ironic that Skype connects the world, but the world cannot come up with a unified way for pronouncing the application’s name?
