Recently, Toshiba Memory rebranded as Kioxia. We covered the announcement in Toshiba Memory is Dead Long Live Kioxia Holdings. Toshiba is a household name, which carried brand recognition and the ability to pronounce that comes with it. If, as an industry, we are going to start buying and deploying Kioxia SSDs, then we need to be able to pronounce the company’s name. Recently, I was at the Kioxia US office in San Jose, California, and I was taught how to say the company’s name.
Pronouncing Kioxia
During my visit to Kioxia’s offices, I learned this phonetic trick to pronouncing the name:
- Key
- Oak
- She
- Ah
The “She” and “Ah” are pronounced quickly together so you may better think of it as “She-ah”. To native English speakers, reading and coming up with that pronunciation may seem unnatural. From our piece, Kioxia is the New Name for Toshiba Memory, the name comes from:
Kioxia is a combination of the Japanese word kioku meaning “memory” and the Greek word axia meaning “value.” Merging “memory” with “value,” Kioxia represents the company’s mission to uplift the world with “memory,” which forms the foundation of the company’s vision. (Source: Toshiba Memory America, now Kioxia America)
Of course, this is certainly one of those cases where reading is good, but hearing is better. I made a quick YouTube video after my visit so that you can pop headphones on and listen. Here is the video:
Important Update on How to Say Kioxia
While we were doing this video, we actually found that Kioxia has its own “How to say Kioxia” video. Here, it is pronounced more like Key-oak-see-ah. It turns out that the executives determined around the launch, that we should say “she-ah” instead of “see-ah”.
Allegedly in one of the early press releases, there was a third phonetic spelling. We are going to use what the company’s US marketing team uses. If things were not difficult enough learning how to say Kioxia, this adds yet another wrinkle.
Final Words
Although we normally focus on reviews, this is one case where I have personally heard “Kai-O-Ex-E-A”, “Kai-Oxi-A”, and most recently “Kyoto” (no idea how that pronunciation was formulated.) It was clearly time to take something I learned and turn it into a reference for our readers. If you are a STH reader, and have a co-worker horribly pronouncing the name, I am going to offer two pieces of advice:
- Bookmark this page, bet a co-worker lunch on the pronunciation, then show them this page and get a free lunch.
- If you hear any pronunciations other than the above, let us know in the comments below.
If nothing else, learning how to say Kioxia and having something like this video to back you up with your co-workers and vendors is a great way to show you have mastered the IT market, even pronunciations.
Oh the joys of a language with an atrociously non-bijective map between letters and sounds.
Thanks for posting a video for this. Nice to see you in a more personable format. Hope to see more of this.
I’ve got a co-worker that uses Kiashia
Kia (like the car company) shia (like Shia Labeouf)
Hey. The name Kioxia itself consists of the Japanese word kioku “memory” and the Greek axia “value”. Combining these two concepts in itself, it symbolizes the company’s desire to make the world a better place using flash memory and will become the basis of its development concept. Kioxia will help society enter a new era of memory, the onset of which is due to the ever-growing demand for high-performance devices for storing and processing large-capacity data. It will also allow the company to maintain its position as a leading manufacturer of flash memory in the market for a long time. Good luck!
I think this is a pretty unnecessary marketing/branding miss. Should have just left it alone, it was well known and in the common vernacular. I would not be surprised if in a few months this decision is reversed.
James, we explained this in previous pieces and the video, but the entity is no longer part of Toshiba and cannot continue to use the brand name.