> What does John mean by "rhyme with 'piped'"?
I got it wrong - what I meant to say was:
> I understand the "usual" pronunciation splits it as "pie-ped" (as with
> a two-legged "biped" and opposed to being "wiped" out). My Webster's
> dictionary also offers "pipp-edd" (i.e., a short "i" sound) in addition
> to John's preferred pronunciation. Interestingly, my Random House
> dictionary offers "parallel-o-piped" as an alternative spelling,
> presumably a bit of cross-fertilization from "parallel-o-gram."
This is just because modern dictionaries hate to be normative,
and so include any mis-spelling that arises often enough.
You referred to my "preferred pronunciation", but I only pronounce
it like that when explaining what it means.
John Conway