Okay. I’ve typed this up in tags before, but I figured I’d make a post about it. This isn’t like, super scientific or anything or even that in-depth and is mostly personal conjecture, so no big deal.
Fandom says: “Cas!”
Canon says: “Cass!”
Well, it’s easy to see where fandom would get ‘Cas’—just ripped from ‘Castiel’. Much like Meg from Megan, or Chris from Christopher. Well that was easy.
Canon, however. Oh, Canon.
Name Theory: So from what we know, there was a small journey to get to Cas’ name. Originally something starting with a B, it turned into Cassiel, which then became Castiel. Well that’s not hard to figure out, using Fandom Logic. Cass from Cassiel.
Phonetics Theory: If you pronounce ‘Cas’, how do you pronounce it? You pronounce it like ‘ass’, but with a hard C in front. C’ass. Cass. Even in English, there aren’t many ways you can pronounce that without any context. But with Cas? You have these options.
“Kass”
“Kahz”
“Kahs”
No long A sound, though—there’s no E at the end. (The long A sound would make it sound like ‘case’. Like a briefcase?)
I think both theories are in use, though. The production team may have just had Cassiel stuck in their heads at the beginning and kept the Cass spelling for his nickname, OR they assumed the phonetic route to make our eyes read then. Ass. yeah.
Okay that totally fell apart back to checking my dash.
binnimon (c)