Still up for Debate

I’ve been wrestling with the proper way to pronounce the word “gyro.” (Oddly enough, I have not been contemplating how to achieve World peace or new ways to reuse candy wrappers.) The sad thing is that I just spent time researching it (if you can call what I did “research”).

It turns out that we’re all right, EXCEPT for the dude who says, “jī-rō,” as he is referring NOT to a tasty, portable, composite-meat sandwich (hopefully consisting mostly of lamb) of somewhat-Mediterranean origin, but rather a compass consisting of a continuously driven gyroscope (a gyrocompass) or (and I swear I didn’t write this definition, although it sounds like Pearl-style, manic rambling):

“a wheel or disk mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and to the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.” ~ Merriam-Webster

The definition above refers to the gyroscope itself. Back to the sandwich:

Merriam-Webster says both of these are correct:
\ˈyē-ˌrō, ˈzhir-ō\

The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink calls it a "JEER-o."

Finally, David P. Baxter in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois says that since the word begins with the Greek gamma, the word in its “authentic” form would be “yee-ros.” He has much more to say on the topic. The link is below, if you’re feeling studious. I tried to read the entire article, but he lost me at “velar fricative.”

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/6/6-1641.html