How do you pronounce Bill Belichick? There are two popular pronunciations that I know of: Beli-chick and Beli-check. The man himself doesn’t use either of those pronunciations, which begs the question: Have we been pronouncing the Patriots coach’s name wrong this entire time?

Listen to how Belichick pronounces his father’s name in this clip…

Belichick pronounces it Bu-luh-chick. I haven’t been able to find another example of him pronouncing the last name to see if this is how he regularly pronounces it. He is not one to speak in the third person, apparently.

We do have the backstory of the Belichick name from David Halberstam’s excellent book The Education of a Coach:

The name was originally Bilicic, and it was phoneticized or Americanized, not, as happened with so many immigrant families, at Ellis Island, by immigration officials reluctant to master the names of the old world, with their weird mixtures of vowels and consonants, but rather by a first-grade teacher in Monessen, Pennsylvania. That teacher, told by Anna Bilicic, Steve’s oldest sister and the first family member born in the United States, that her names was Bell-uhchick, wrote it down as Belichick, thereby earning the undying hatred of Mary Barkovic Bilicic for corrupting the family name.

That really doesn’t give us any answers. The Belichick family itself is conflicted, so just follow the lead of that first-grade teacher in Pennsylvania and pronounce it however you want.