As a child, I learned a lot about chess from my racist Uncle Don, who showed me some chess openings, including the Ruy Lopez, named for the Spanish priest who first wrote about the line. Most English people pronounce ‘Lopez’ in a way possibly recognisable to the Spanish, while Ruy is often pronounced like ‘rye’, which I think is not right.  Yet Don, like all of my family, spoke with a Suffolk accent, and in Suffolk ‘rye’  comes out as ‘Roy’, so for quite a while I was convinced the name of this opening was the ‘Royal Opez’.

More recently, I have heard some well-meaning US chess YouTubers have another go at getting Ruy right, and are going ‘Roo-ee’.  Which is probably phonetically a bit closer but that is not really a two-syllable name — two noises perhaps but not two syllables.

So today I found a chess video about the Spanish Opening, in Spanish, by a native Spanish speaker, and he pronounces it like this:

Carry on…