In the course of writing about Lauren Reilly’s DeLorean, I came across a strange dilemma concerning one of the quotes from “Back to the Future.”

In the scene where Marty McFly tells Young Doc Brown the amount of energy needed to power the flux capacitor, Brown has a minor meltdown. “1.21 JIGOWATTS!” he says over and over. That’s how it’s written in the script — jigowatt. But you won’t find the word in the dictionary. What you will find is gigawatt. And since we pronounce gigabyte with a hard g, it seems logical that gigawatt would follow suit.

According to BTTF.com, an unofficial movie fan site, the subject was addressed in the Special Edition DVD by Bob Gale, the movie’s producer, in his voice-over commentary during the scene with the scale model:

I should talk about jigowatts for a second. The proper pronunciation is, of course, gigawatts [with a hard g sound], and when Bob [Zemeckis] and I were doing research, we talked to somebody who mispronounced it jigowatts. And we were actually completely unfamiliar with the term, and we thought that was how it was supposed to be said. It does come from the Greek root gigas [that Greek root is pronounced with a j sound, not a g sound], for gigantic, so I suppose it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. But never having heard of it, we actually spelled it in the script jigowatt. So a jigowatt is actually supposed to be a gigawatt, a million watts. So the mystery of the gigawatts is now solved.

I wish it were that simple. According to Wikipedia, the official National Institute of Standards and Technology pronunciation is with a soft g. The Merriam-Webster dictionary lists two pronunciations: soft g first, then followed by a hard g.

It seems Doc Brown was right all along.