‘Boy-see’ vs. ‘Boy-zee’: A linguistic debate hundreds of years in the making
Editor’s note: This story originally published Feb. 1, 2022. It has been updated slightly as part of our Oddly Idaho series.
Whether your family has lived in Boise for four generations or you just got out of the U-Haul from California, you’ve no doubt heard the debate on how to pronounce Idaho’s capital city.
In a nutshell: Those not from Boise tend to pronounce it “Boy-zee,” while many locals favor calling it “Boy-see.”
And with thousands moving to Boise and across Idaho over the past decade, how one pronounces the word is often used as a way to distinguish who’s local and who’s a recent arrival.
But the debate of “Boy-see” versus “Boy-zee” is nothing new. It goes back nearly as long as Boise has been established as a city, nearly 160 years.
And during that span, news articles show that residents and visitors alike have hardly ever agreed on a uniform pronunciation for the City of Trees.
Longtime residents will be familiar with the name’s origin story: French-Canadian fur trappers in the early 19th century traveling through Southern Idaho came upon a valley lined with tall cottonwood trees, exclaiming “Les Bois!”
It’s unclear how accurate that story is, but Boise — French for “wooded” — appears to refer to the many trees that lined the Boise River.
Boise, as a city, was founded in 1863, and it didn’t take long for questions about the pronunciation to pop up.
One of the earliest examples was an 1864 article in the Gold Hills Daily News, located just south of Reno, Nevada, which discussed the pronunciation of the recently founded town.
But the pronunciation wasn’t Boise as many longtime residents might say it today.
“The celebrated mines up north, Boise, usually pronounced as a monosyllable, is a word of two syllables,” the article said. “The correct pronunciation is: Boizy, the ‘s’ having the sound of a ‘z.’ ”
The article then goes on to ask readers how Idaho, then just a territory, is pronounced.
There have also been a series of articles, particularly in the early 20th century, across the nation written almost as geography quizzes, telling East Coast residents what the far-off capital of Idaho is called.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the writers offer a few different answers: “Boy-zee,” “Boy-say,” “Boosee,” “Bossy,” “Bwa-say” and “Bwaz” to name a few.
And for nearly as long, those outside Idaho have long feared the supposed backlash for pronouncing the name incorrectly.
In 1919, Dr. William Brady, a popular health columnist at the time, was invited by the Idaho Statesman to deliver a health talk in Boise. In a preview of the talk, he said he had heard several different pronunciations for the city and was greatly concerned about getting it wrong. He developed a solution, of sorts.
“I am just going to buy my ticket to Nampa and hang around there until I hear someone give away the true secret,” Brady said.
All this raises the question: Why is Boise pronounced “Boy-see”?
For that, there appears to be no clear answer. Mariah Devereux Herbeck, a French language professor at Boise State University, told the Statesman there appears to be little connection between today’s pronunciation and the original French word.
For example, “Les Bois” does not include any “s” sound; it’s pronounced “lay bwah.” Additionally, the French word boisé is pronounced with a “z” sound at the end, as in “bwah-zay.”
The modern-day pronunciation most likely stems from a local adaptation of the pronunciation, she said.
“Clearly the residents of Boise have made ‘Boise’ their own by choosing to pronounce the ‘s’ as an ‘s,’ ” Devereux Herbeck said.
It seems unlikely, though, that explanation will quell any sort of debate about the pronunciation. And the debate isn’t even restricted to Idaho. In Boise City, Oklahoma, locals pronounce their town as “Boys City.”
But we’ll save the history on that for another article.
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