Pronuncation of web addresses in Spanish

[Manuel]

How do Spanish people say a web address out loud? Like, in English, you would say "dot, com" for the ".com" at the end. How do Spanish people pronounce that dot?

[chileno]

...punto com

[wrholt]

Originally Posted by Manuel

How do Spanish people say a web address out loud? Like, in English, you would say "dot, com" for the ".com" at the end. How do Spanish people pronounce that dot?

Sometimes it depends on the particular set of characters. As chileno says, the character "." is "punto", and ".com" is usually "punto com".

But some domains are usually pronounced letter by letter: ".org" is often pronounced "punto o ere ge", for example.

[Manuel]

Thank you both!

So what determines whether they pronounce the individual letters or not? Is this totally arbitrary?

[chileno]

What do you mean?

Usually we will pronounce the individual letter (spell) if you are not understanding or if it is an acronym, else we will say the word itself, and that's it.

[AngelicaDeAlquezar]

It's not arbitrary. The combination ".com" kind of makes a word by itself (same for ".gob", or ".es" for example), but ".org" is hard to pronounce and hard to distinguish from other extensions when said aloud and fast, so that's why spelling the letters is better, although there are people who make a special emphasis when pronouncing "org" as a word so everyone understands what they're saying.

If you see ".mx", ".cl"., ".ws", etcetera, you could hardly pronounce the phonemes, so you read the letters.