How is Boeing pronounced?

The surname comes from Germany. Wilhelm Böing emigrated to the United States in 1868 and prospered in the timber and iron trades in Detroit; his son William Edward Boeing, born in 1881, founded the Pacific Aero Products Company in Seattle on 15 July 1916, renamed Boeing Airplane Company the following year. Crossing the Atlantic, the umlaut disappeared and the "ö" was transcribed as "oe," which in English is read as a long o. That's why the correct pronunciation is "BOH-ing," stressed on the first syllable with a short second syllable, just like "going" or "showing."

In American English the standard form is /ˈboʊ.ɪŋ/. In Spanish it is common to say "bóin" or "boin," and in spoken media one also hears "boing," like the sound of a spring; none of these are wrong as adaptations, but the closest to the original is "BOH-ing," marking the diphthong. In French it is said "bo-ing" with the two vowels separated, and in German the original sound "bö-ing" is sometimes recovered. What doesn't fit is "boo-ing," a reading of "oe" as a u sound that only occurs in words of a different origin.

The company has been called Boeing without interruption since 1917, first as a manufacturer of seaplanes and mail biplanes and later as the builder of the B-17, the 707 or the 747. Headquartered in Seattle until 2001, then in Chicago, and in Arlington, Virginia since 2022, the founder's name, who left the company in 1934, remains the brand pronounced most often at any airport in the world, almost always with a different accent from the one he himself used.