How to pronounce MLA

MLA is most commonly pronounced "em el ay" (/ˌɛm ˌɛl ˈeɪ/). This is the widely-used reading among engineers, though edge cases exist.

Multi-head Latent Attention, the DeepSeek-V2/V3 attention variant that compresses the KV cache into a latent vector. Spoken as an initialism, letter by letter: em-el-AY (STRESS on the final letter). Not pronounced as a word. Collides with other meanings of MLA (Modern Language Association, etc.), so in ML context spell it out and rely on the surrounding words Multi-head Latent Attention.

Source: DeepSeek-V2 paper (arXiv 2405.04434)

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.