With the release of Wonder Woman, star Gal Gadot finally gets a spotlight all to herself. The Israeli actress has appeared in some of the biggest movies of the last several years, including four entries in the Fast and the Furious franchise and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. She’ll also reprise the role of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman in the DC Extended Universe’s Justice League, which is due out later this year. But if Gadot’s face is nigh inescapable, she’s not yet a household name—and even people who do know her name usually say it wrong.
Perhaps it’s the similarity to the absent title figure of Samuel Beckett’s most famous play, but the go-to pronunciation for Gadot’s surname tends to treat it as if it’s French: Guh-DOH. But as mentioned above, Gadot is not French: She’s Israeli, and she pronounces her name, quiet sensibly, in the Israeli fashion, which is to say with a hard T and a short O: Guh-DOTT. Here’s Jimmy Kimmel, making a good effort but not quite getting it right.
But why subject yourself to the imprecision of phonetic spellings when you can learn from the woman herself? Here’s Gal Gadot saying “Gal Gadot,” followed by a long string of people following her lead.
One last tip. The correct pronunciation of “I am upset that a movie that is opening on well over 2,000 screens will have a tiny number of individual showings whose audience is voluntarily limited to women” is “Boo-HOO.”
