January 28th, 2020

How do you pronounce WinDbg?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

The debugger that comes with Debugging Tools for Windows goes by the name WinDbg, short for Windows Debugger, and generally pronounced win-debug or win-dee-bee-gee. It’s part of a suite of lightweight debuggers, along with ntsd (short for NT Symbolic Debugger) and cdb (Console Debugger), which are all based on the same debugging engine, creatively named DbgEng.

However, the question was how I pronounce it, and I pronounce it the same way as many other old-timers: We call it windbag.

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Old New Thing
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Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

6 comments

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  • Pavel Kostromitinov

    In my surrounding everyone pronounces it as “win-de-be-ge”

    • Алексей Евдокимов

      No-no-no, it’s «виндэбэгэ».

  • GL

    My instinct pronounce it as “wind-bug”…

  • philiplu

    As I recall, one of the NT debugger devs back then (20+ years ago) hated hearing it called windbag. But it was too late – we all called it that, probably from the start (mid 90s, if not earlier).

  • Gunnar Dalsnes

    strangely WinDebug is only 8 chars so there was never any need to shrink the name to fit 8.3
    That probably mean the internal windbag joke won over common sense:-)

  • Lachlan Picking

    I always liked wind-bag since I first heard it years ago, but generally I opt for win-debug because otherwise people have no idea what I’m talking about.

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