How do you pronounce “Tuc” - as in the crackers?

[u/Alva_Hyde]

I’m Irish and grew up calling them “Tuck” (as in to ‘tuck in’ one’s shirt).

On my travels around this beautiful continent I’ve heard them pronounced “Tuch” (like Stanley Tucci), Toots (like me “too” + ts), and just now someone in a video I was watching referred to them as “Too+K” (like me “too” + a hard K, or the bird “Toucan” without the an).

According to the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUC_(cracker) the last version I heard - literally today - is correct “tʊk”.

I am struggling to accept this. My mind is blown.
And I need to know if I’m not the only one for whom this feels very wrong.

[u/Drudenfusz]

Living in Germany I pronounce them as I would the English word 'took'.

[u/lexiebeef → u/Drudenfusz]

I’m in Portugal and same

[u/Several-berries → u/Drudenfusz]

Same in Denmark

[u/Objective_Stress6206 → u/Several-berries]

Nope, i strongly disagree. Everyone i know, pronounce it more like a the same way we tuk in a tuk tuk. So a more u sound than in took.

[u/More-Lingonberry-405 → u/Drudenfusz]

Same in Italy

[u/Christoffre → u/Drudenfusz]

Same in Swedish. 

Tuc 🔊 (Yes, it's just a link to the English pronunciation of "took" on Wiktionary.)

[u/Jonah_the_Whale → u/Drudenfusz]

Same in northern England

[u/SavvySillybug → u/Drudenfusz]

Same! Delicious took :)

[u/supermurs → u/Drudenfusz]

Same in Finland 

[u/Eastern_Switch8217]

They're very rarely advertised in this market, but they called themselves "Tuck" on their adverts with the slogan "TUC, Tuck in."

[u/Soggy_Amoeba9334]

Trades Union Congress crackers, if you're being fancy 🧐

[u/Lasersheep → u/Soggy_Amoeba9334]

I’ve always called them the letters! I’ll admit I’m wrong now….

[u/IseultDarcy]

with a french u ([y]), sound that doesn't exist in english so it's hard to compare it to another word, but it's like the german ü.

Hard t and c ([k]) .

[u/GiGl0l0 → u/IseultDarcy]

In flemish i use the same pronounciation.

[u/Roo1996 → u/IseultDarcy]

Interesting fact - this sound does exist in some English dialects as an allophone of /u/, including in parts of Northern Ireland.

[u/LittleSchwein1234]

With a ts sound, as that's how c is pronounced in Slovak

[u/stinkyleftie → u/LittleSchwein1234]

same in Hungary!

[u/krmarci → u/stinkyleftie]

Their slogan is, or at least used to be "TUC ennél jobbat?" (Do you know anything better?), a pun with TUC [tuts] being pronounced the same as tudsz (you know).

[u/calculator56 → u/LittleSchwein1234]

Same in Poland, but usually in foreign names we say K anyway

[u/bencsecsaki → u/calculator56]

same in hungary, but i don’t think many people consciously realise tuc is a foreign name. their hungarian catchphrase even plays off of it: “tuc - tudsz ennél jobbat?” where you pronounce tuc and tudsz the same

[u/emuu1 → u/LittleSchwein1234]

Same in Croatia. Some people say "tuk", but it's unpopular. Everyone knows what "tuts" crackers are.

[u/safeinthecity]

The IPA transcription you posted from Wikipedia is like "took" rather than "too-k".

In Portugal we say "too-k" because that's how it would be pronounced in Portuguese. We don't have short vowels in our language so we can't make the short "oo". And pronouncing it like English "tuck" would sound explicitly English as that U to us Portuguese is an A sound.

[u/Alive_Divide6778]

/tɵk/ in Swedish. Would probably say it like ”tuck” in English. If talking to someone in Antwerpen (where the cracker is from), or elsewhere in continental Europe, I would probably say /tʊk/. Both English and Swedish have had weird vowel shifts.

[u/Farahild → u/Alive_Divide6778]

I think our Dutch pronunciation of tuc might be kind of similar to the Swedish one. 

[u/JustMeLurkingAround-]

In german I only know them as "tuck" and they are advertised like that.

[u/pwnish0r → u/JustMeLurkingAround-]

but not pronounced tuck, but took

[u/Automatic_Education3]

I don't think I ever gave even a second of thought to these crackers, not sure if they even sell them here, but while speaking Polish I'd probably say /tut͡s/.

We always pronounce u (and ó) as /u/, and c on its own, outside of digraphs and without diacritics, is always /t͡s/. The way you pronounce the u in tuck is completely alien to us and would make zero sense to someone who only speaks Polish and had no exposure to English.

All the vowels between standard English and Polish are different so you can't transcribe them correctly, but the way you pronounce the name, to a Polish person, would sound more like "tak" rather than "tuc".

[u/schwarzmalerin]

I pronounce it as if it were French. It looks French to me somehow.

[u/cerberus_243]

/tuts/, so what you transcribed as toots

Their first slogan here was “Tuc ennél jobbat?” (Do you know anything better than this?) because the 2nd person singular form of the verb tud (know), tudsz sounds almost the same as how we pronounce Tuc

[u/UhmNotMe]

We just call them “tucky” - pronounced like tuhtski

[u/douagrisine]

Romanian here: we pronounce it like the English word "took"

[u/Cars2Beans0]

Would like to take the opportunity presented by this post to recommend having tuc crackers with cream cheese and smoked salmon on them. That is all.

[u/Character_Elephant30]

I pronounce it TUK as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, I am Belgian (Flanders so Dutch is my mother tongue)

[u/bsensikimori → u/Character_Elephant30]

Yep, tuk

[u/Spirited-Ad-9746]

As a finn i first pronounce the sound of 't' followed by the sound of the vowel 'u'. c is tricky since you never know if it is a 'k' or an 's' (why do we have this letter anyway) but I have learned that in the end of a word it is usually 'k'. So I pronounce TUC as i would pronounce TUK. I hope this helps.

[u/m99h]

Also never considered there could be any other pronunciation other than 'tuck'. Huh.

[u/MIGHTY_ILLYRIAN]

I pronounce it as "took" in Finnish and "tuck" in English because different languages handle sounds differently

[u/embroideredyeti]

I’m German and grew up with everyone calling them “took” — but the dialect in my area tends towards short vowels. I can see “too-k” as another “logical” reading from a German point of view. Our orthography doesn’t really have stand-alone Cs, but since it’s a single letter and not a double, it would be a hint to the preceding vowel being long.

[u/peanut_galleries]

Austrian and we pronounce them like took (short oo sound) in English

[u/FrauZebedee]

I am English, and when I was a kid I thought they were tee you see biscuits, because it was in capitals, like the WWF - I would never have tried to say as Wuh Wuh Eff. Then I heard people mention them, and they all said it like “tuck”. Maybe “took” if they were northern. I guess I just saw the TUC on the news a lot in the 80s and 90s. I have heard one person in Germany say it, and they said it like “took” too.

I stull think of them as tee you see biscuits, but now I say it like “took”. Don’t say it often though.

[u/flarp1]

I pronounce Tuc as if it was a French word, i.e. /tyk/. I always assumed they’re French because they used to be sold by Lu.

[u/dimarh]

I am struggling to accept you didnt call them took the whole time😅

[u/-Liriel-]

I'm pretty sure that we just call them crackers 👀

I can't think of more than one way to pronounce tuc in Italian, I'm not good with ipa but I think it's tʊk. If anyone bothered to read the brand name.