LHA is a freeware compression utility an associated file format. It was created in 1988 by Haruyasu Yoshizaki (吉崎栄泰, Yoshizaki Haruyasu?), and originally named LHarc. A complete rewrite of LHarc, tentatively named LHx, was eventually released as LH. It was then renamed to LHA to avoid conflicting with the then-new MS-DOS 5.0 LH ("load high") command. According to early documentation, LHA is pronounced like La.