How to pronounce NF4

NF4 is most commonly pronounced "en eff four" (/ˌɛn ɛf ˈfɔːr/). This is the widely-used reading among engineers, though edge cases exist.

4-bit NormalFloat, the information-theoretically-optimal 4-bit datatype introduced in the QLoRA paper (Dettmers et al., 2023) and shipped in bitsandbytes for quantized fine-tuning. Read as an initialism plus the digit: N-F-FOUR. "NF" = NormalFloat, "4" = 4-bit. Main stress on FOUR. Not "niff-four".

Source: QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs (arXiv 2305.14314)

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.