TIL that "nginx" is pronounced "engine-x", and not "n-jinx"
nginx ("engine x") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server. […] [1]
I still pronounce it as "n-jinx" in my head.
::: spoiler References
- Title (website): "nginx". Publisher: NGINX. Accessed: 2025-02-26T23:25Z. URI: https://nginx.org/en/.
- §"nginx". ¶1. :::
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And JSON is pronounced “javascripton“
Oh my god it's Javascripton Bourne!
Occasionally i feel myself longing back to the good ol' JSOFF times.
It's a real book 💀
It's fantastic too!
Show me the c++ book thickness
That is the lamest decepticon transformer I’ve ever heard of
JavaScript is actually pronounced with a g.
Gagascript. One is soft, one is hard.
Gangaacrupt?
GuavaScript?
Edit: of course that's actually a thing.
Wtf?
It's Jason. If they wanted it pronounced that way, they should've spelled it differently...
Like GIF
Sorry, no, at least one could argue GIF. JSON is a single freakin' vowel short of a common male name.
Morons.
Jason = jay-sun
JSON = jay-sawn
No, it's pronounced Jason. Douglas Crockford was just too laissez-faire to correct anyone on it probably because he didn't give a fuck.
If you really just say Jason instead of jaysawn/J-sohn you're nuts and probably drive everyone crazy with that
You & your buddies can keep pronouncing it jaysawn & sounding like complete dorks if it makes you feel better. However, it was clearly intended to be pronounced naturally as Jason like its inventor pronounces it.
Believing otherwise is almost as bad as the plebs who think the symbol ∅ is inspired by Greek letter φ instead of Scandinavian letter Ø.
Didn't realize I was buddies with 99% of everyone that's interacted with JSON!
Also didn't know people used the term 'plebs' unironically, you sound like an absolute joy to be around
You seem in irrational need for validation of your pronunciation despite clear justification against it. Cool ad populum. Fly that insecurity flag high.
They're joking. js doesn't even officially stand for JavaScript due to Oracle's IP claim over the JavaScript name.
Oracle probably makes more money from the dmca than their actual products tbh.
Oracle actually making products and services is only their side hustle
And even more annoying, JavaScript is not correctly uppercased for common styles
GIF like Geoffrey the giraffe, if you get my gist. Always has been.
I always thought the G stood for graphics, but now I know it stands for giraffics.
It doesn't matter what it stands for. That's not how acronyms work.
You don't say "yolwa" for "YOLO"
You don't say "Ah-ih-dees" for "AIDS"
You don't say "britches" for "BRICS"
You don't say "sue-knee" for "CUNY" (City University of New York) Etc.
And if you want to argue specifically about G:
You don't say "Jad" for "GAD" (generalized anxiety disorder)
You don't say "joes" for "GOES" (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)
It's not a hill I'm going to die on, I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I've ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it "jif". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation
Now let's talk about "gibs" you heathens.
SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.
And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.
People forget in the 90s/00s both GIF and JIF were relatively common image file types. It was only logical to use the hard G for GIF. So that's how we used it. This overrules all arguments of how acronyms work or what the creator originally called it.
Bah, I was there. .jif was barely used and came 5 years after. They should have used a different name!
nobody was using jif as a file type in the 90s, and no it wasn't "only logical to use the hard G". There are plenty of sources stating that no one pronounced it with a soft g up until it got popular as an image format on social media. It was universally understood to be a play on the peanut butter name. There are plenty of sources on this, I'm sorry but you're either just making shit up or you were the only person to call it with a hard g in the 90s.
I thought we were having a bit of a joke, but then you really went and gave me a gift of paragraphs.
I think the creator was keeping the joke running by saying that. The word gift is why people prefer to say gif over jif, it's how we were taught to pronounce "gif". The rest of the g words are irrelevant to be honest.
Of course not, then it would conflict with SUNY (State University of New York)
JPEG = "jay-feg"
Jrafics.
I've been pronouncing it N-gin-X, which is probably close enough once slurred together
I always called it “in-gen-ix”, which doesn’t even make sense now that I think about it.
Unless you’re from New Zealand
Uhn-jun-uhks in NZ TYVM.
There's a linux file called fstab which is often pronounced f-s-tab because it's a table of file systems. It was somewhat surprising to hear Dave Plummer pronounce it as "f-stab", as in stabbing someone...
It'll forever be F-stab in my head
I was a non violent youth when I first saw an fstab, perhaps that got me thinking "F S tab"
Whereas fsck, short for "file system check", should be pronounced "fisk" when someone in a suit is around, otherwise it's "fuck".
It's ef sock in my head
it kinda ends up as "fsuck" for me, which is apt-get when it doesn't magically fix all my filesystem issues
f*ck. You can even occasionally get away with spelling it like this
f-s-tab is feeble. Unsatisfactory. Bureaucratic.
f-stab is jocose. Nonchalant. Sharp.
F-s-tab is boba
F-stab is kiki
Is that pronounced as gokoze?
"F-stab" is just more fun to say.
Insert dank Winnie the Pooh meme here for F-STAB
That's... Unfortunate.
With the issues i had in the past with fstab, the desire to stab someone was certainly provoked.
I guess some people might go with f-s-tayb, but I wouldn't necessary recognise what they were saying.
N-jinks is silly, f-stab is cool.
Yeah, the j-sawn pronunciation is truly inexplicable. Who pronounces S-O-N "sawn"?
I believe the Greeks do where the name originates from.
https://youtu.be/sDTf0-j_Dyk
I'm hearing ya-sun-ahs. That U is halfway between uh and oo, like the U in "put".
I laughed out loud when I first learned that imgur is supposed to be pronounced as "imager'... well you fuckin chose the wrong combination of letters for that didn't ya
1000% I say gif too, like gift. If you wanted it pronounced like “jiff” then you should have spelled it with a J.
I flew from Jermany to Tanzania and saw some jeriatric jiraffes.
I say it "Jif" because:
Or with a Đ.
Choosy moms choose Dzhif.
jif was copyrighted. gif was literally named after the peanut butter. it came with a jingle "choosy developers choose gif". How many different forms of proof do you need.
Am I missing something? I've always pronounced it "imager". How else would you pronounce it?
as it's spelled: im gur.
It's one thing to name it imgr, but putting a fucking u after the g makes it a hard g in literally every instance. the letter u is the reason the g is pronounced as a hard g in words that otherwise wouldn't need a u: fragile / guile, digest / guest, etc.
"I'm gur"?
Tony... Is that you?
it's spelled img - ur, as in
imgor the shortening ofimagein every context. You can't shortenimageany other way.no, it's spelled imgur. I know what img stands for which is why I said it would be one thing to call it imgr. the u doesn't make sense and it hardens the g. it's funny that you talk about how it's customary that img stands for image but you act like 'ur' is also a thing by itself.
well it is, just not in that way. if your img-ur breakup made any sense for pronouncing img as if it's independent then why not consider what ur stands for? it's a shortening of your or you're. so why not pronounce it image your? because it's bullshit and the spelling is ridiculous.
I've always pronounced it "not-Apache"
And GIF is pronounced GIF
PNG is pronounced "PING!"
Lo and behold,
P[i]NG
Pi
The fuck?!
CMYK is pronounced smück.
Schmuck.
P- iNG
careful there buddy
They can pry my /ɡɪf/ from my cold dead hands.
/dʒɪf/ heretics can burn
No no, we won't be having any of that. It's not GIF it's GIF!
like how
curlin my head is "curl" and not "c-url"It is pronounced like "curl" though!
https://curl.se/docs/faq.html#What_is_cURL
…it's not "curl"?
EDIT (2025-02-27T04:15Z):
🤔
::: spoiler References
This is "jif" levels of upsetting me
I pronounce gif like zyhfe to annoy both jif and gif pronouncers equally. I also advocate for the initial array index to be .5 to be equally annoying to programmers and mathematicians alike.
Monster!
C-url, like "sea earl"?
When I first heard someone say SCSI out loud describing the drives in a server, I responded with, "No, they're actually high-end drives."
And I will always pronounce SQL as “squeal”
My brain first interpreted SQL as 'squirrel' and that now refuses to relinquish its claim as default pronunciation in my mind.
genius
I still say it this way in my head...
I say PSQL as Pee Sequel
I say FAQ as fuck you.
Some people pronounce it like "fack", and the official way to pronounce GameFAQs is "game facks"
Yes, I have hear this much
That's great actually!
I've never heard it pronounced any other way than "engine x".
I've never heard it pronounced. Which is why I also thought it was "n-jinx"
When I first encountered it, it was by hearing it. It took longer than it probably should have to recognize that when people talked about “engine x”, they meant “in-jinks”
I heard it spoken first as well, but I ended up seeing it in text form not long after. I think it would have been more confusing if that hadn't been the era of internet companies thinking they were clever if they dropped a letter (usually a vowel).
nyuh-inks
I started using it around 2006, and even back then it listed the pronunciation on the site.
Wow, I never knew people thought it was pronounced differently. Never even considered it looked like jinx.
Rules of English, the closest I'd come is n-jinx. You don't pronounce letters individually, unless reciting the alphabet or something.
Unless you pronounce the letter "B" the same way you say it, like the bug that makes honey.
We don't say "beenefits" or "bee eee an eee eef eye tee ess"
Well you see, this is software so the rules break down here in favor of cool. I guess I just grew up surrounded by naming conventions like that so could easily identify it.
Why would I pronounce something with rules of English that's not an English word? When I say the word jalapeno, I pronounce the tilde on the n even though in English it's neither written with the tilde nor written with a letter combination that would produce that sound through standard English spelling.
Yeah lots of people don’t realize that 1. English rules don’t matter a majority of the time, 2. English has a lot of loan words that people mispronounce, not just mispronounce from the perspective of the owning language but from an English rules perspective as well, and 3. Proper nouns don’t give a shit about anything. GIF is a proper noun, created and owned by a company. They get to call it whatever they want and the rules of the language don’t matter. I
that's not how most people do though, a lot of people will nativize words to the language they're speaking or are most used to. Like with your example of "jalapeno" that's.. one of the more famous words for people to pronounce in wild ways, there's a video of a swedish guy who manages to turn it into "japaleno" because that's more compatible with swedish.
And postgresql is pronounced post-gres-Q-L, even though it probably should be post-gre-SQL
I just pronounce it postgres. That's the original name of the database. It originally had its own query language (quel), and SQL was later retrofitted onto it and called PostgreSQL. But the original quel language is long gone that we may as well go back to calling it just Postgres.
I just say "post grezz sequel". Sorry if it pisses people off, but it's a stupid name, so I'm gonna say it the way I want.
postgres2electricboogaloo
PSA: it's acshully pronounced "Postgre-squirrel".
Postgre-squirtle
SQL is not traditionally pronounced like "sequel". Sequel was a whole different language.
Official pronunciation for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL all pronounce each letter.
But "sequel" is probably more common at this point and some of them include it as an alternate pronunciation now.
squeal
“S-Q-L ‘aight” for SQLite?
Something like that, yes. More info at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/431329/what-is-the-correct-pronunciation-of-sqlite with links to videos of Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) pronouncing it.
I actually couldn't find a section on pronunciation in the official FAQ, though I think it was there in the past. Still, they do use phrases such as "an SQLite database", indicating that "SQLite" starts with a vowel sound.
I thought Sequel was an earlier version of SQL. That's what I remember reading when I looked it up.
Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History
I'm not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.
I pronounce it sqill.
It's actually pronounced "squirrel"
What’s the difference? Those read the same to me. Do you mean that you want a strong gap between “gre” and the S in S-Q-L?
The first one is post-grez-queue-el, the second one is post-gree-es-queue-el
The first is the only way that makes sense, the second too easily becomes post-grease-queue-el. Which is horrible.
I will be calling it post-grease from now on.
A colleague pronounces it "Postgré"
btrfs -> butterface
Thank you, i will call it that from now on
I can't read no, I can't read my butterface~
I went for n-ginx too. I've known for a while that it's actually n-gin-x but have to think carefully to not revert back.
"Engine-X" just sounds dumber. N-ginx for life
As always, first impressions count. There is no way I'm starting to call it engine x now, except for fun.
I've done a semi-exception in the case of Xitter. I like this new name Elon chose because it brings the possiblity of playful sounds. Same goes to Xitler.
In Chinese, "X" makes a "sh" sound.
Take from that what you will.
That's the point...
Not everyone knows that though.
My workplace calls it "n-jinx", we know its nonstandard but its still what is understood by the team.
I thought it was pronounced N-G-N-X
NGNX, the other tetragrammaton.
Although I'm Jewish, so I should probably write it N-NX.
I'm OOTL.
That is the protagonist from the (IMHO excellent) movie Equilibrium. He describes himself as a "tetragrammaton cleric." Prior to your comment, I didn't know the first word had any actual real world meaning, so that's where my mind went when I saw you use it. (Apologies if this is disrespectful to the intent of the word.)
As an interesting side note, supposedly that movie is what got Christian Bale cast as Batman.
Sounds cool, will add to the watch list.
I'm hella atheist, for the record, so no worries. Any actual Jewish practice was a few mothers ago, but mentioning it added both humour and another hint for people who know the concept but not the word.
Equilibrium is a really boring movie. Imagine if The Matrix's fight scenes were centered around a gunfighter whose primary strategy is to stand in one spot and that doing so was a plot point and all the neat plot points of The Matrix were replaced with a plot about not feeling emotions.
Feel nothing, stand in one spot. Movie done.
Well, you're wrong.
Yeah, actually looks like it was critically panned, too. I do love a good dystopian speculative fiction, but maybe not the top of the watch list.
Ha! There's probably some other layer of theology there when you consider that that G stands for "Gine" pronounced like "Djinn."
Where did the I go?
To be or not to be, that is the question
Where did I come from?
Idiot. Using English letters to try to represent sounds they don't normally make. It didn't work for gif (pronounced commonly as gif instead of jif), why would they think it would work for them?
first rule of english pronunciation: there are no rules. All that matters is if people understand what you mean when you say it.
I gave up on this discussion when you have to consider gin, generate, giraffe, gene, gym, etc
Also I pronounce it with the soft sound because that's what it sounds like in the bloody alphabet.
See also ghoti (fish). English orthography only works by agreement, not rules
I'll be the first to say that English is a mess. However, there are rules, and this word breaks them.
That "gh" never appears at the beginning of a word, always at the end (as in "enough"). That "ti" is never at the end of a word; it's always inside (as in "nation").
Ah, a VSauce Fan
Yes, but a fan of so much that I may have heard of that before Vsauce covered it. Vsauce is much good though, all of them have some credit
According to Wikipedia, that spelling goes back to 1855. I first heard about it in the '90s.
How do you pronounce the words "Cat celebration?" Is it "Kat kelebration" or "sat selebration?" I'm guessing the latter since that's how C is pronounced in the bloody alphabet?
i pronounce "gay" as "jay-why" because of the bloody alphabet
Good thing you're not German or gay would be "Guh-ypsilon."
Just say gif like gnome
Nifty
guh-nif?
so I assume you also say "jit-hub"?
No, and you don't say juitar (guitar), jame (game), or jallon (gallon), either.
Yeah, because those all start with gu or ga.
It's pronounced GIF
No, it's pronounced GIF
Also, the correct pronunciation for that Atlassian tool is "Gira".
"G" does normally make a "J" sound, though. Giraffe, the second G in garage and garbage, engine, gin, and so on.
"nnnnn-ghinks"
One time I was getting estimates for server software for an embedded device I had made. In a teleconference, I told one company that our prototype server ran on nginx. They emailed us an estimate saying we had to switch our embedded system to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, and put the server on Microsoft's cloud, because "Engine X is not an enterprise web server."
You have to say it in a commanding Japanese accent... Engine X
It sounds way cooler that way
🤌
Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX
I always pronounced it engine-x (fluent as one word) but never thought of it meaning engine lol
n gin x -> en gin ex -> "enginex" spoken, nginx thought
Putting the gin in Nginx.
Make me
I think software name pronunciation discussions are so hilariously absurd that I sometimes purposefully vocalise nginx as “Nuhh Ginks” just to put a hat on it
En Guh Inks
I pronounce k8s as k-eights sometimes on purpose to gauge the reactions
Wait do you mean “kates” or “Kay-Eights”? I think either makes sense and I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow
If you said it like “Kuhh-Eights” I would probably laugh
TIL some people pronounced it n-jinx
I mean every time I hear about the damn thing it's because it's been misconfigured and is causing some fucking ruckus. The whole thing is cursed so jinx really feels appropriate where I'm standing from.
I always heard it as /ŋiŋks/ in my mind
Ok so I know what ŋ sounds like but I bet there are some idiots here who don’t, so maybe explain it.
For them
In relation to English, it's the "ng" sound in the common "-ing" ending or suffix.
Wikipedia has an entire article on it (of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_nasal
For some reason if you put that sound at the beginning of a word most English speakers can't say it.
I used to pronounce the name Nguyen as "ngoo-yen" until somebody told me it's pronounced "win", and i was like "What?"
Do you mean /ɲiɲks/?
Here are the sounds for each:
::: spoiler Referencs
Nope.
Thank you for verifying 🙂
hnn-geenks
Saying nginx with a "hard g" can get you into some real trouble...
Is that rap slang if you're referring to a lady? 😬🫣
It's pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove
You are a very silly man and I'm not going to interview you.
I can't stop pronouncing USAID as u said even after i finally heard it instead of just reading it
This is hilarious
You just made me laugh halfway through a yawn.
Oh damn, I’m gonna be thinking of it as that now too
I will be dead and buried in the ground before I call nginx "engine x"
How do you pronounce it?
Really weird hill to die on, but okay.
If you want people to pronounce your project name correctly you should spell it that way. Having a FAQ on pronunciation means you've messed up and lost already. Want it to be called "Engine X"? Call it "Engine X".
My favourite is SAP not wanting people to call it Sap but to spell it out S.A.P. Well sorry, but it's a CVC word, literally the first kind of word everyone learns.
even a dash, ngin-x, would do it really
And is even worse sign if you need a document to describe how to pronounce its name. It is a sign you should pick another name.
Do our USAian overlords now require us to submit names to ensure those won't be mispronounced on purpose? You people are insufferable.
Who do you think I am?
“Nugginx” is how I have always read it
As a scandi Iv'e been leaning more into 'enginks' - close to 'engangs' and french kinks.
Wow, I pronounced it N-G-X. Don't know why.
It took a while for me to get it, but it still read ngnix as "n.g. -nix" in my head.
This surprised me too. But that was in 2012 😂
Oh boy - finally a modern internet nerd argument equivalent to the pronunciation of GIF!
https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/english.ogg (from back when many english speakers were still insistent that the i in Linux should be pronounced "eye")
It's, ummm, literally the first thing on the website (nginx.org). Tell me you didn't read the docs without telling me you didn't read the docs
the docs are under documentation, not on the homepage tho
My lead dev used to pronounce it njinx and I always needed some time to realize what he's talking about.
you mean its not En Gee Nix?
similar problem with kubectl
It's obviously kubecontrol! I will die on this hill.
Also, Containerd ... Not helped by the cli nerdctl.
Hm, my guess would be either "cube control" or "cube C-T-L".
EDIT (2025-02-28T09:02Z): Hm, actually, given that it's for Kubernetes ^[1]^, maybe it's "koob control" or "koob C-T-L"… ^[2]^?
::: spoiler References
We refer to it as kew-bee-cuttle
It's short enough I just spell it out
Can you believe that fucking dipshit ruined the letter X for all of us 😤
I've always pronounced it "In-jen-iks". I blame Jurassic Park and it's fictional biotech company InGen, but it does kinda also sound like "eugenics". But I dunno man, if you want everyone to pronounce your software a specific way maybe spell it in a manner where the pronunciation is more obvious? Just a thought.
En-eh hinks (with heavy Spanish accent)
I like to pronounce it as nginks like fucking inks. Yes, with a ng sound in the beginning.
Like the Vietnamese name? So... "Wininks" ?
Yes, like the Vietnamese name "Nguyen", but not like "wininks". The best I could describe it is as a hybrid between "ninks" and "ginks". Pronounce the first consonant with the back of your tongue while keeping the image of pronouncing an "n" sound in your head.
Oh shit my bad, I mixed Ng and Nguyen, thanks for correcting me.
Also that's hilarious, I'm totally trying that one with the lads Monday, they're gonna love it :D
Now you'll tell me it's not pronounced Hap Roxy!
Wait till you find out about quay
Same.
I just kind of knew that, but not sure how.
Wait, so this isn't a testosterone supplement?
When this baby hits 200rps, you’re gonna get some hairs on your chest
I'm glad there's pronunciations provided, because to me it looks like it should sound like a slur.
I split the middle with en-JIN-iks (which is how I heard it said long before I saw it written)
am i the only one who thought it was nyuh-inks
No ^[1.1]^.
EDIT 2025-02-28T10:17Z: Actually, @[email protected], I was wrong in my initial interpretation ^[1.2]^. So, from what I can tell, you are, in actuality, the only one itt! 😊
::: spoiler References
I really dislike the trend of made up pronunciations. I can accept that gnome is with an audible g since that makes more sense than a silent g, but nginx can be at best similar to engine-x, but even then it's more like the n in dnd rather than en.
And ngrok is en-grok, not en-jii-rok...
Does this mean when you go into an airport bathroom and see the hand dryer, you know it's called an XLerator (ex-LAIReighter)?
The meaning kind of clicked to me the first time I've seen the word and tried to pronounce it - it ended as [ẽ.'ʒĩ 'ʃis], the first part is close enough to English [ˈɛnd͡ʒɪn] ⟨engine⟩ that the association was obvious. ([ʃis] is just the Portuguese name for ⟨X⟩.)
Not En Jinnicks?
Wait till you hear about SearXNG or SxncD
I'm not sure what the English pronunciation of "n-jinx" sounds like but I'm pronouncing it "engines" as in plural of engine.
Um das mal phonetisch zu schreiben: Es würd sich ungefähr wie "en dschinks" auf Deutsch anhören.
en-dschiniks
My colleagues were right?!
But of course they pronounce the "ine" as in brine (we are French), which is what really hurts my ears, ugh.
@Kalcifer And
(At least in some LATAM places) SQL is "pronounced" as SEQUEL...
Nginx is atrocious. I about have a stroke every time I have to work with it. Caddy is 1000x easier to set up.
Please no! Not another fucking reverse proxy. I can't take it anymore T_T
N-gin? Cortex's henchman???
Thank you for saving me from future embarrassment.
Or just becoming terminal "um actually"-er like I've become with epoch
https://youtu.be/tyQvjKqXA0Y
Don’t wanna yuck y’all’s yum but gross
Omg really was someone pronouncing like "njinks"??? Wtf is wrong with you lol
Who cares? Pronounce it whichever way you want as long as it's clear/understandable. It would take longer for me to understand what piece of software engine-x is, but it takes a second at most.
I look forward to the day when all these lame-ass, insider naming conventions are looked down upon as the stupid things they are.
Wtf does "en jinx" or "engine X" have to do with it's functionality?
I hate looking for an app on my phone that does a particular thing but hell if I can recall what the idiot developed called it.
Things like that are called "jargon" and are perfectly normal and acceptable in a given field, always been that way.
If you don't know how to pronounce, or even spell, NGINX, you probably have no use for it.
N. Gin X
It's this guy in powered up Boss form