How to pronounce cuDNN

cuDNN is most commonly pronounced "coo dee en en" (/ˈkuː diː ɛn ɛn/). This is the widely-used reading among engineers, though edge cases exist.

cuDNN is NVIDIA's CUDA Deep Neural Network library, a GPU-accelerated set of primitives (convolution, attention, matmul, pooling, normalization) that underpins PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX. Say it COO-dee-en-en: the lowercase 'cu' inherits CUDA's 'coo' sound (as in barra-CUDA), then D-N-N is spelled out letter by letter, with primary stress on COO. Non-native devs commonly misread the prefix as 'see-you' (C-U) or 'cud', which sounds wrong to practitioners. It's non-obvious because 'cu' is a CUDA abbreviation glued onto DNN, not a standalone English syllable.

Source: NVIDIA Developer — cuDNN (CUDA Deep Neural Network library)

Pronouncing project and product names correctly avoids the small but persistent friction of being gently corrected during standups, conference Q&As, and team calls. Hearing the word a few times locks in the right reading better than reading IPA ever will. Pronounce is a community-maintained dictionary — every entry tagged with a confidence level and (where possible) a citable source.