How to pronounce Erdos

Erdos is most commonly pronounced "AIR dursh" (/ˈɛrdɜːrʃ/). This is the widely-used reading among engineers, though edge cases exist.

Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős; Wikipedia gives the Hungarian IPA [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]. Two things break English speakers: the final 's' is /ʃ/ ('sh'), and 'ő' is a long front-rounded vowel /øː/ that has no English equivalent (nearest is the NURSE vowel in 'bird', or German ö). So it's roughly AIR-dursh — stress on the FIRST syllable — commonly anglicized to AIR-dish or UR-dosh, but never 'ER-doss' or 'ER-doze'. CS folks hit this constantly via the Erdős number and Erdős–Rényi random graphs (Rényi is already in the dict), and almost everyone says the spelling-based 'ER-doss' with a hard final 's'.

Alternate readings you might hear:

• "UR dosh" /ˈɜːrdɒʃ/

Source: Wikipedia — Paul Erdős (Hungarian IPA [ˈɛrdøːʃ])

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.