A hollow voice says "Plugh".
If you're a fan of the famous computer game, "Adventure," in which you
can spend hours exploring a cave full of treasure and peril while haunted
by sepulchral voices, the above will
sound familiar and perhaps take you back a few years.
If not, you can find out more at the links below.
Plugh is a magic word used in several text adventure games, including:
- Adventure (the original)
- Radio Shack's Haunted House (for the TRS-80)
- Pyramid 2000 (another TRS-80 game that was basically a clone of Adventure but took place amongst the pyramids of Egypt)
- Raaka-Tu (yet another TRS-80 adventure game)
- Bedlam (and even yet another TRS-80 adventure game - also available on the TRS-80 Color Computer)
Somehow, however, plugh never quite retained the fame it deserved.
Instead, it fell into the shadows of another more famous magic word:
xyzzy.
Oh, and I never really did know how to pronounce the word,
plugh, so if you happen to know,
please tell me!
Someone recently posted an old usenet article written by Don Woods as follows:
From: Don Woods
Date: 1997/02/27
Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
Subject: Re: XYZZY
Alas, Crowther was responsible for XYZZY and PLUGH. I
think I remember him saying that he'd generated them at
random, but I don't remember how (or even if) he pronounced
them.
For my part, I say "zizzy" and "ploog". I'm actually rather
emphatic about the latter, since it's supposed to be said in a
hollow voice. I've heard some people pronounce it "plug", "pluh",
or even "pluff", and when I imagine the hollow voice trying to say
those I keep thinking the poor voice is going to break down
laughing... (A hollow laugh, naturally. :-)
On the other hand, PLOVER was my addition, and since it's
keyed to the name of the bird ("an emerald the size of a
plover's egg!") it ought to be pronounced like the bird. But --
aha! -- being ignorant on the topic, I always thought the bird's
name was pronounced ploh-ver. It wasn't until I saw the
discussion here that I thought to look up the word, and found
that both pluh-ver and ploh-ver are accepted, but pluh-ver is
apparently preferred. Oh well. But if you pronounce it pluh-ver,
don't blame me if the magic doesn't work!
-- Don.
Many years ago, my cousin and I were so into these games (especially
Adventure) that we wrote a game language and several adventures that
used this language. You can play these games on-line at:
Related links: