Hey everybody!

One of my friends released a game a while ago but has only recently decided to change its name. The new name he picked, 'Ainion', didn't sit well with myself as I found it difficult to pronounce, so I thought I would run a test and ask a group of random people during the day how they would say it. Interestingly, all but two people pronounced it differently!

So I thought I would look a little more into this (as my friend is sure it's a suitable name) and decided I'd turn to you guys! My question is quite simple; Why can't people from the same English-speaking region pronounce Ainion consistently?

Thanks to you all!

For one thing you have a conflict between onion and ion. Also the Ai could be pronounced like a long A or like eye. That's four pronunciations right there. You might also get the inion part pronounced like the bump on the back of the skull, IN-ee-un, giving you Ay-IN-ee-un. I'd be interested in know what all pronunciations you got from your random people. BTW, I googled "ainion" and got 14 billion hits. Might not be a real good name.

>14 billion hits

what's up with that?! they all seem to be false hits (okay, I didn't look at all of them).

Really. I didn't see ainion in any of them. Nor anion neither, which is what Google seemed to think I wanted. It didn't even offer me the option of showing results for ainion instead.

My first thought was to pronounce it like onion but with a long A at the beginning: ayn-yun. The spelling is confusing.

I didn't see ainion in any of them

Type in 'Ainion meaning"
there are references to elves and angels.

Orson Scott Card, author of current movie "Ender's Game",
uses a form ainu, to mean an inner part of an individual
even deeper than a soul.

Anything saying how to pronounce it?

Ainion. (Eye-nee-on)

i woulda said ehnion

Just to be contrary I would pronounce it /'injən/ or in curious eye-dialect, unreproducible form "EEN-yun. Goign for a sort of British approximation of Oedipus even though it's probably not from Greek αινος (ainos) 'tale, fable' or αινος (ainos) 'dread, terrible'.

[Fixed typo.]

Some interesting replies here, Thank you all! I hadn't actually thought to try Googling it myself as I assumed it was most likely rather unique, although 14 billion hits would suggest something quite the contrary! That on it's own is a good reason to not choose a word such as this one. As I'm British myself it seemed some of the variants I heard actually had a French influence; i.e. one pronounced it as "En-yoh", another more "ein-yoh". The pronounciation two people unknowingly shared was as above; "eye-nee-on".

As for a meaning of 'Angels', that's very interesting; it's amazing how some supposedly random words can have such a beautiful meaning.

Yeahbut© the 14 billion hits never seemed to have ainion in them anywhere.

If you exclude the "anion" bit from the google results, there are about 34000 hits left, some of them interestingly referring to
Tolkien