What The Hell Is The Right Way To Pronounce Gyro?

Today, while perusing GrubHub for what I was going to eat for lunch, I stumbled upon a Greek restaurant. I am a huge falafel guy, so I often steer toward mediterranean food since I find that is where some of the best falafel is from. While looking through the entire menu, I saw a nice selection of gyros.

I do not eat meat, so I have actually never ordered a gyro at a restaurant or food cart, but they looked so goddamn delicious I decided to go to YouTube to see if there were any recipes for vegetarian gyros. The woman, while detailing the recipe, said "we're going to be making 'ji-rohs', or as my more cultured husband says 'euros'.” You can listen for yourself here.

I was flabbergasted. Not only did this woman take a shot at me by implying I was "uncultured" for pronouncing it this way, but her husband pronounced it another way I was previously unfamiliar with. I was as offended as I was confused. As per usual, I took to Twitter to see if I was the crazy one or off the mark.

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Now, at this point I figured these were the only two potential pronunciations. Boy was I wrong.

I received 5+ different pronunciations. The most common were: ji-roh, yee-roh, euro, guy-roh, your-oh. How is this possible? How have we made it this far with all of these different, contradictory ideas? I understand that accents have an impact on pronunciations. Someone who speaks Greek or has a native accent will be different. Still, there is nothing worse than someone who has absolutely zero legitimate affiliation to Italy saying "mootzarell" or "rickot." That is not what I am trying to encourage here. I want one united gyro pronunciation front.

We need to unite together to decide what is the proper way to say this so we can stop embarrassing ourselves at restaurants. It sucks when you are out to eat and you panic and don't order something because you can't pronounce it. My vote is for "-ji-roh," but I am open to literally anything as long as we are all on the same page.