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Dunder (Double UNDERscore) Alias

Mark Jackson was the first to suggest dunder as a speech shorthand for double underscores (__) in a reply to a query from Pat Notz. Ned Batchelder later stressed the need for a way of pronouncing __:

An awkward thing about programming in Python: there are lots of double underscores. [snip] My problem with the double underscore is that it's hard to say. How do you pronounce __init__? "underscore underscore init underscore underscore"? "under under init under under"? Just plain "init" seems to leave out something important. I have a solution: double underscore should be pronounced "dunder". So __init__ is "dunder init dunder", or just "dunder init".

Antonio Rodriguez reported immediate adoption of the alias.

2026-02-14 16:07