[...] each glyph has its own monosyllabic name, designed to be pronounced quickly in combination with another glyph to form a rune name. As languages are often read-aloud, this saves the programmer from having to say "dollar sign, question mark"--"bucwut" is much more compact.

– Hoon documentation

Because Hoon uses ASCII symbols so heavily (there is some resemblance to Perl or even the APL family, although Hoon is more regular than both), it presents a serious vocalization problem. To aid in speaking Hoon – both for actual communication, and to assist in subvocalized reading – we have our own one-syllable names for ASCII tokens

– Urbit: A Solid-State Interpreter

The following pronunciation listing is directly from "Phonetic names for symbols" (Listing 3 from the Urbit whitepaper).

| hax

$ | buc % | cen & | pam

•    | tar
  

•    | lus
  

•    | hep
  

, | com . | dot / | fas \ | bas : | col ; | sem < | gal = | tis

   | gar

? | wut @ | pat ( | pal ) | par [ | sel ] | ser { | kel } | ker ^ | ket _ | cab | | bar ~ | sig ‘ | tec ’ | soq

Irregular pronuncations

To avoid a few tongue-twisters, some runes have irregular pronunciations that should be noted

– Hoon documentation