Spell My Name with an "S"/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Arabic

As a general rule, Arabic transliteration sucks. Even the name Muhammad has almost a dozen different forms, ranging from simple transliteration differences (Muhammad vs Muhammed) to, um, "Mehmet" (the standard Turkish form).

  • And then there's the Qu'ran/Kuran/Koran/Alcoran. You'd think that, if anything, the title of the most important book in the Arabic language would have a consistent Romanization, or even one that was more common or popular than the others...but no. Likewise, Muslim/Moslem (the latter, though being a legitimate and older transliteration, is nowadays disliked by Muslims due to its similarity with a word meaning "oppressor").
  • For this reason, most Westerners know Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, one of the most famous Muslim leaders of the Middle Ages, as Saladin.
  • Colonel Muammar/Muamar/Moammar Khadafi/Quaddafi/Gaddafi/Gadhafi/etc., dictator (now deceased) of Libya. (Some sites jokingly add "may his spellings be many" to most attempts at translitering his name.) A 1986 article in The Straight Dope showed that the Library of Congress had identified 32 different spellings in use. If you look up "Qaddafi, Muammar" in the Library of Congress Authorities database, you can currently see fifty-four variants in the Latin script, and nine in the Arabic. Wikipedia has more information, including a chart.
  • Usama/Osama/Oussama bin/ibn/ben Laden/Ladin, as well as Al Qaeda/Al Qaida. The latter can also vary the capitalisation of "Al", whether or not it's hyphenated and whether or not there's an apostrophe (or a backtick) after the "Qa" syllable. By way of illustration, The BBC uses "al-Qaeda", CNN uses "al Qaeda", the Guardian uses "al-Qaeda" and "al-Qaida" interchangeably and the Times uses "al-Qaeda" and "Al-Qaeda" interchangeably, none of which are correct; القاعدة‎ should be transliterated as "Al-Qa'ida". The ع is what's called a "pharyngealized glottal stop".
  • T.E. Lawrence explicitly made a point of rendering Arabic names as inconsistently as possible in his writings, to emphasize that there's really no good way to do it.
  • Qatar is pronounced as though it should be spelled Kuttur.
  • A similar example of transliteration not matching how the word sounds in Arabic is the way "Jafar" is pronounced in Aladdin. In the correct pronunciation, the first A is the 'ayn, a sound that doesn't exist in English, and the second one is a short A. In the Aladdin pronunciation, the first A is short, and the second A is practically an alif. Then again, it's not like they did the research about anything else, either.


Japanese

  • Prior to and during World War II, Tokyo was Romanized as "Tokio" as often as not (this is still considered correct in German, Spanish, Italian and Finnish). The word doesn't even work that way, because the correct pronunciation has two syllables, "toe-kyo", while the "Tokio" spelling implies three, "toe-kee-oh".
    • It is actually possible to translate all letters of the syllable based scripts Hiragana and Katakana directly to roman letters, however the spelling "Toukyou" seems just completely wrong.
  • Antique maps go completely mad trying to work out transliterations of Japanese. Edo (the former name of Tokyo) shows up as Yedo, Yedso, Jedo, Jyedso, Edzo... Shikoku, the southern island, fares even worse. Also, to further the confusion, Ezo (or Edzo) is the old name of Hokkaido.
  • The name of a certain ethnically Korean voice actress from Japan can be romanized as either "Romi Paku" (her name transliterated from Korean to Japanese to English) or "Romi Pak" or "Park" (her name in Korean transliterated directly to English).
  • This restaurant in Portland, Oregon is named after its signature specialty, a Japanese favorite that may be unfamiliar to Americans ... especially if they expect it to be spelled "curry" like in 99% of other contexts.
  • Similar to the note below under Chinese, Japanese also famously has issues trying to render words in European languages. It actually was worse when Japan first started dealing with other countries during the Meiji Restoration; their solution at first was to simply pick kanji that would be pronounced as close to the original word as possible. For the most part, this was eventually abandoned and katakana was pressed into service for this purpose instead, although some remnants still exist - "Bei" and "Beikoku" (literally, "rice country") are still occasionally used in kanji to designate the United States (the kanji for rice, at the time, could also be pronounced "A").
  • There's also the name of the country itself. Usually said "Nihon" in modern Japanese, "Nippon" is the formal spelling/pronunciation, dating back to a time when the current /h/ phoneme was realised as /p/; just to complicate matters further, when the country was first reached by Europeans, the same phoneme was /ɸ/, giving rise to "Nifon". Most linguists trace the English word for the country back to an older Chinese dialect via Malaysia.
  • Multiple possible kanji readings, pre-dating the standardization of Hepburn Romanization, and a few other errors resulted in contemporary allied intelligence on the IJN Hiyō (and the class named for her) having half a dozen different incorrect names depending on who was doing the report.

Korean

There are three major Romanization systems for Korean resulting in a lot of confusion.

  • The figure skater Kim Yuna's name (김연아 which actually rhymes with "fun ah") would be spelled "Kim Yeon-a", "Kim Yŏn-a", or "Gim Yeon-a" under each system. She herself spells it the way she does because it's very hard to get anyone foreign to pronounce it correctly, and settles for people pronouncing it "Yoo-na", which is actually a different name in Korean (유나).


Hebrew and Aramaic

Various names in religious works and other ancient literary sources often end up with multiple English equivalents:

  • The transliteration of the name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible is a matter of some controversy; "Jehovah", "YHVH", "YHWH", "Yahweh", and many more versions have been used throughout history.
  • The Jewish holiday of [CcKk]?[Hh]an{1,2}uk{1,2}ah? (Chanukkah and variations, for those not familiar with regular expressions).
    • Few Jews would particularly care how you spell it as long as it's recognizable.
  • Jesus appears as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs) in the Gospels (Koine Greek); this derives from either the Hebrew יהושע (Yehoshua) or Hebrew-Aramaic ישוע (Yeshua). Both mean "Yahweh/Jehovah rescues". Most languages derive his name from the Latinised form of Ἰησοῦς, which is Iesus.
  • Basically, anything with a "j" in it is a result of the fact that "j" used to sound like "i" or "y". When that changed, they didn't change the romanization, they changed the pronunciation. Usually. "In the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with an I!"
  • There is often confusion over Hebrew ה he, ח ḥeth and כ khaph. They were three separate consonants in the Middle Ages, but the consonants were simplified in different ways depending on the dialect of Hebrew, or when another language loaned a Hebrew word or name. He and ḥeth were usually loaned into English as /h/, and khaph as /ch/ (pronounced like /k/). In Modern Hebrew, he became /h/, but ḥeth and khaph became chet and chaf, pronounced something like the "ch" in loch or Bach and usually spelt either /ch/ or /kh/ (though the modern chet is spelt /ẖ/ in formal contexts). With these somewhat ambiguous pronunciations in English and Modern Hebrew, unless you're familiar with Hebrew spellings, it can be hard to glean which consonant was originally used. To make things more confusing, כ is also kaph (pronounced /k/), which sounds just like Modern Hebrew ק kuf, which was a separately-pronounced consonant qoph in the Middle Ages. Yeah, Hebrew is fun that way. Transliteration of Modern Hebrew spells both of these /k/, and English traditionally uses /c/ for kaph and /k/ for qoph. Though this /c/ and /k/ are pronounced the same even in English, the /k/ was conventionally used to emphasize qoph as an emphatic consonant, audibly harsher than kaph. This may be one of the earliest recorded uses of Xtreme Kool Letterz. Still, by separate tradition (loan via Greek and Latin), there are even some Hebrew names with qoph in English that are spelt with /c/, such as Cain.
  • Hebrew has a few transliteration conventions (possibly in the same vein as Arabic), and none are official. This is most annoying with road signs because the signs can use a different convention than, give or take, a map. And it's not obvious that one street should be another. For example, names that start with a J will have a confusingly different spelling when the convention to start with a Y is used, even though they're pronounced the same.


Greek

  • The vast majority of Greek historical and mythological names have come to us in their Latinized form (partially due to the Romans being completely obsessed with Greek culture). So the actual Greek forms of such names as Alexander, Ulysses, Achilles, and Ajax are Alexandros, Odysseus, Akhilleus, and Aias. There are also the occasional pairs of Greek and Latin versions that are completely different or only somewhat similar, like Mars for Ares or Hercules for Herakles. A fairly reliable system for backtracking into Greek from Latin is to replace all c's with k's (ch > kh too), replace final -us with -os or final -a with -e (though that's not always right), and change all ae's and oe's to ai and oi.


Cyrillic

  • Nina Myer's Code Name from 24 can be variously transliterated as Elena, Yelena (what the show went for), Yelana, Jelena (the more correct Serbian spelling) and Jelana.
  • In English-language figure-skating fandom, more hardcore fans will use the standardized German transliterations for Russian names, despite the fact that all the skaters use the standardized English transliterations professionally.
  • The Russian translation of Ethan of Athos transliterates the names in the title (which are respectively Hebrew and Greek) from English, rather than use the standard Russian forms.
  • The translation of Cyrillic to English led to a rather embarrassing situation for ice hockey player Semyon Varlamov -- his first name can also be transliterated as Semen, which was used as his name by most media outlets when he was drafted by the Washington Capitals in 2006. The Capitals were quick to correct his name to "Simeon" (another valid transliteration), which stuck until his breakout season with the team in 2009. Following that season, Varlamov changed the spelling to its current form, this time to get the media to pronounce his name correctly.
    • That's due to some spelling peculiarity in Russian; the letter "ё" (iotized "o"), used in his name, is for various historical reasons discouraged from appearance in print, to be replaced by the letter "e", whose respective sound isn't even close. The boundaries between several letters in Cyrillic (both in pronunciation and spelling) have shifted over time, resulting in a couple of words where, in different declinations, a ‘ё’ appears to jump around between the syllables depending on which one gets stressed. These shifts has also lead to the mispronunciation of the last names of Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev (Khrushchyov and Gorbachyov, respectively). Both names should be stressed on the last syllable.
  • What's more, Khrushchev's name is only six letters long in Russian—Xрущёв—and is pronounced nothing like how the English-speaking world knows it. For one, the "shch" isn't a "sh" followed by a "ch," it's a "sh" with spread lips that sounds rather like an angry cat.
  • For some reason, in English, we use the French transliteration of Tchaikovsky's name. We could've use Tschaikowski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovskiy, or Chaikovsky, if we wanted (the Cyrillic is Чайкoвский). Maybe the "Tch" just looked better. The same is done with the title of the Lieutenant Kijé Suite by Prokofiev. This seems to be part of an old tradition of Russian things reaching English-speaking countries by way of France.
    • Tchaikovsky wrote music for the ballet, which may be how he came to English filtered through French. His contemporary Chekhov who wrote the sort of thing that appealed to the English taste, like plays and exquisite short stories, came to English directly.
  • Sergei/Sergey Korolev/Korolyov the rocketeer.
  • The many spellings of Chebychev Chebyshov Tchebycheff Tschebyscheff Tjebysjev Chebyshev Чебышёв are a running joke in mathematical circles. Exercise: Set up a computer lab where each computer is named a different spelling of this name.
  • As are the various spellings of Tikhonov Tychonoff.
  • Cherenkov/Čerenkov/Cerenkov/Czerenkow radiation in nuclear physics. The first is the standard English transliteration of Черенков; the others are respectively Czech, anglicised Czech and Polish, and can also be found in English language texts.


Chinese

There are multiple romanization systems and the language uses many sounds simply not found in English and other major European languages, and vice versa. Chinese people who do business with foreigners or study abroad also have a habit of taking foreign names that have no relation to their original names. True examples of this trope may occur when someone decides to use an unofficial romanization of his/her name (i.e., makes something up). See the article Why Mao Changed His Name.

  • In Singapore, most ethnic Chinese people have names taking the following order: either Western name(s) - surname - Chinese name, or surname - Chinese name - Western name(s), with the order inverted depending on whether the circumstances are formal or informal. Mainland Chinese and most overseas Chinese can be differentiated in certain ways, such as the Chinese diaspora using dialect names where PRC Chinese would use Mandarin names (Tan/Chan for Chen, Lieu/Liew/Leow for Liao, Ko/Koh for Xu, etc.), and also overseas Chinese sometimes preferring to split two-syllable Chinese names into two words where the romanised PRC Chinese name would be given as one word (Ai Li where a mainland Chinese would use Aili, etc.).
  • In case anyone was wondering, rendering foreign names into Chinese is at least as difficult. Country names are all over the place, ranging from attempts to replicate the sound (Xibanya for Espana/Spain or Jianada for Canada), to copying one syllable (Yingguo for England; Guo meaning 'country'). People and cities typically get called something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original name.
  • Studying Chinese history is a major pain due to this - Jiang Jieshi and Chiang Kai-Shek are two spellings of the same person. For the most part, modern media uses the Pinyin romanisation (i.e. "Jiang Jieshi") because it's way more accurate to what the names sound like in present-day standard Mandarin, which simplifies things. Unfortunately, either you get some historians keeping the Wade-Giles or Cantonese (e.g. Chiang Kai-Shek) spellings out of tradition, or you have to read old history texts. Uh...
  • There is another issue related to the Chinese language's historical status of the lingua franca of East Asia: they would pronounce a Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese name based on the Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese character form of the name. As (especially) Japanese and Korean are using more indigenous names--not to say Japanese already had that tradition (see Alternate Character Reading)--sometimes the "hanzi form" of the names can only be guessed. The guesses may not be accurate, and disputes have occurred on which is the correct form. Take Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha's Hayate as example: this name, in kun-yomi, can be used for any hanji that means "strong wind." Yet, one dub decided none of those sounded feminine enough for a girl, and decided to go phonetically (Hayatie), and then immediately accused by fans for They Just Didn't Care.


Thai

  • Thai Parents will often pick English nicknames for their kids, and they don't relate to the Thai name necessarily.


Mongolian

  • Ghengis/Genghis/Chinggis/Cinggis/Chingis/Jengis/Jhengis/Zingis/Zhingis/Shingis/Dshingis and above all Dschinghis Khan! It should be noted that Chinggis is the closest the the Mongolian spelling and pronunciation, and is generally what Mongolists use. It should also be noted that despite what English people say, "Khan" is not pronounced "Kaan", but with the Russian "x", which kind of like your expelling a popcorn from your throat. Or you could just say "Haan". Period-correct Mongolian would be Chinggis Khagan, with the g pronounced as a farther-back version of the voiced equivalent of the kh. [1]


Latin

  • A fair amount of Roman names fall into this trap, as archaic Latin used C for the hard "G" sound and Classical Latin didn't have the letters U or J. The common Roman names Gnaeus or Gaius were abbreviated Cn and C respectively and some helpful Latin transliterations replace I used as a consonant with J, Gnaeus/Cnaeus Pompeius Magnus or Caius/Gaius Julius/Iulius Caesar are just two examples of the C-G and J-I confusion.
    • The C-G confusion began quite early, around the 2nd century AD. Since the Romans didn't have sound recordings they didn't know that "Caius" was originally pronounced the same as "Gaius", so parents who chose to use the old-time spelling pronounced it the way it looked, creating a new praenomen. While everyday Romans wouldn't have noticed the consonant shifts, their scholars did. This is how modern historians know about it, despite the same lack of said sound recordings.
  • The English weren't helpful about this back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thinking that names like "Marcus Tullius Cicero" and "Gnaeu--Cnaeu--(whatever) Pompeius Magnus" were too much in the way of mouthfuls, they "helpfully" reduced a number of famous names to short nicknames. Which have, in the main stuck. That's why we talk about "Pompey" instead of Pompeus Magnus, "Livy" instead of "Titus Livius," or "Vergil" (or "Virgil") instead of Publius Vergillius Maro. Cicero seems to have escaped relatively unscathed -- nobody talks of "Tully" anymore.
  • Even pronunciation is a hassle -- Gaius Julius Caesar, whose name we pronounce roughly like "Guy us (or Gay us) Julie us Siezer", would have been pronounced by him and his contemporaries as Gai-oos Yoo-li-oos Kai-sar. V's were pronounced with a "w" sound, giving a humorous "real" pronunciation to the Roman general (and failed rebel against Nero) Vindex -- who did not "clean up." And then don't even get into Ecclesiastical Latin, which is pronounced more like Italian.
    • Cicero (him again!) is generally pronounced Sisero in English, but Kikero in Latin, similar to the way Caesar's name has changed since then.
  • In the Middle Ages, spellings could vary widely, based on the fact that Medieval Latin was used alongside various languages developing from it such as French or Italian. As an example, the same person could be referred to as Godfrey, Godefroy, Gaudefroi, Godfrid, or Gaufredus in different manuscripts.


Inuktitut

  • This one gets complicated: in the Canadian Arctic, aside from dialect differences from west to east, you also have different foreign influences. When Inuktitut is transliterated using the Roman alphabet, you get a situation where spelling in the Eastern Arctic, influenced by Scandinavian whalers and the presence of the Danes in Greenland, uses things like "j" and "u" where the same words in the west, influenced by English and Scottish traders, use "y" and "o". Then it gets even more complicated because Protestant missionaries in the east then introduced the syllabic alphabet, while Catholic missionaries in the west kept the Roman alphabet. Then when the syllabics gets transformed into the Roman alphabet, you get an even different spelling.


Persian

  • Algebra and Chemistry were originally Persian words (which are adapted from Arabic per se). Algebra was originally "Jabr" and Chemistry was "Kimiyagarey". Ironically the latter word is re-adapted by Iranians from Latin and changed into "Shimey".
  • Algorithm derives from surname of the scholar who coined the term "Algebre", Al-Kharazmi.
  • Renowned Avicenna is actually called "Abu-Ali Sina".
  • Iranians themselves have issues with spelling errors. Arabic [alphabet] lacks four commonly used letters in Persian (ch as in chimney, g as in gate, p as in purge and j as in French name Jean). Therefore names containing these letters have two different spells. One with those letters changed to similar letters and one with localized Arabic alphabet with the letters included.
    • Actually, the letter j exists in Arabic alphabet, the ch as chimney is rendered with two letters t-sh, the g is used only in oral dialects not written ones, but is usually transcribed with the equivalent of g letter for foreign words. The p and v doesn't exist however, and are rendered recently by newly-created special symbols (b and f with three points).


Ancient Egyptian

  • Ancient Egyptian was written without vowels, and in many cases the vowels that went with each word are unknown. Those vowels known by Egyptologists had to be painstakingly reconstructed using various linguistic methods, from ancient transliterations, cognates, Coptic, etc.
    • When Egyptologists want to transliterate a word directly, they can only transliterate the consonants, leading to unpronounceable goodness like nb-ḫprw-rˤ twt-ˤnḫ-jmn ḥḳ3-jwnw-šmˤ. So they make up arbitrary pronunciations for day-to-day use, i.e. turning the above into "Nebkheperure Tutankhamun Heqaiunushema" which weren't actually how his names were pronounced in ancient Egyptian. But there are many different ways to make each word pronounceable, and equally many ways to express a reconstructed ancient pronunciation, depending on the mother-tongue of the Egyptologist. Add to that the sometimes close, sometimes rather off ancient Greek and Roman pronunciations, multiple ways to transliterate those Greek names, and the occasional Coptic cognate or Babylonian transliteration, and you get a complete mess. Most Egyptian names have 5 or 10 different spellings.
    • The best part? The Egyptian scribes weren't consistent either. The language was written for thousands of years and evolved over time -- eventually using three different writing systems, then evolving into Coptic with yet another writing system -- and scribes from later periods likely didn't know how the language had been pronounced hundreds or thousands of years before their lifetimes. They often preferred to reproduce exactly the original spellings when copying an old text, but would make mistakes when dealing with very unfamiliar spelling styles. (English-speakers, imagine trying to copy a handwritten chapter from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, when you can barely make out what it says, and can't easily guess at the words that are faded or missing. Then imagine it's also in a different alphabet.) Apparently, later scribes didn't really know what to make of all those consonants and syllables appended to the ends of words in older texts, since later forms of the language turned those endings silent. This led to all kinds of what was probably outright misspelling, and of course muddies things further for today's Egyptologists.
      • Oh, and both Ancient Egyptian and Coptic had multiple dialects. Most of the dynastic period dialects were unofficial and therefore rarely written down, making their occasional cameos additionally confusing.
    • For example, "Anubis" is the Greek name of an Egyptian god of mummification and the dead. The usual hieroglyphic spelling is transliterated, most directly, as jnpw (or ynpw). That's four consonants and, presumably, three or four unspecified vowels. The evidence is actually that the name was originally pronounced something like *Yanāpaw, and then by the 1st millennium BCE it was more like *Anup. So "Anubis" is really not that far off. It is, nonetheless, a relevant example, because when it comes to Egyptian names we are often forced to chose between one of the many semi-arbitrary Egyptological pronunciations (Anpu, Inpu, Yanupu, etc) and the Greek version (Anubis). Or the reconstructed Egyptian pronunciation (*Yanāpaw, *Anup), but no one seems to bother with that. And the Romans called him Mercury too.
    • For another example, here's how many ways one particular deity's name has been spelled: ḳbḥsnnw.f, ḳbḥsnnwf, ḳbḥsnw.f, ḳbḥsnwf, Kabahsenuf, Kebechsenef, Kebehsenuf, Kebhesenuef, Qebehsennuf, Qebehsenuf, Qebekh-sennuf, Qebesenuef, Qebhesennuf, Qebhesenuf, Qebh-sennu-f. None of the above is a reconstruction of the actual pronunciation.

Other

  • The title of Czar has at least 4 different spellings.
  • The capital of The Republic of Georgia (Not the state of Georgia, USA), T'bilisi or Tbilisi or Tiflis.
  • The internationally renowned Copola producer Fred Fuchs.
  • During the 2006 Winter Olympics, certain English language broadcasts referred to the host city of Turin by its Italian name Torino. This is a somewhat interesting case, as an earlier spelling was Turin, in the Piedmontese language (the local language to that area). It's only since Italy has been unified that the Italian name Torino has been used. Both "Turin" and "Torino" are recent variations. Thank Jupiter we don't have to call it by its actual original name, Augustus Taurinorum.
  • The city of Gdańsk, also known by its German name Danzig, has caused numerous flame wars on Wikipedia between people who support one name over the other. Other cities in western Poland such as Szczecin/Stettin, Poznań/Posen and Wrocław/Breslau have mostly escaped the controversy, because English speakers nowadays tend to use the Polish names exclusively but a lot still do know Gdansk as Danzig. The train station at Auschwitz still uses the native name Oświęcim.
  • Many Dutch last names have various spellings, 'van de berg' for example has also the 'van den berg' 'van de bergh' and 'van den bergh' variations.(they all mean 'from the mountain. yes, those things that don't exist in the Netherlands.) there are many other examples.
  • "Trivandrum" (English) vs. "Thiruvananthapuram" (Malayalam).
  • Burma/Myanmar. Weirdly, because of differing Romanizations, non-rhotic dialects and regional variants in pronunciation, these are in fact the same word in the country to which they refer. The ruling junta passed the Adaptation of Expression Law in 1989 establishing Myanmar as the official Westernised version of the country's name. Many countries, including the UK, continue to call it Burma as a way of showing they do not recognise the junta's right to rule. The BBC refers to Burma on its domestic programming and Myanmar on the World Service. This is probably why the country is consistently referred to as "Myanmar (Burma)" on maps. Specifically, Burma is an approximation of the country's name in the colloquial dialect, Myanmar in the formal dialect. (Neither dialect bears a great deal of resemblance to how it's written, mranma - Burmese spelling hasn't really changed since the fourth century. By comparison, English spelling hasn't changed drastically since the sixteenth century.)
  • For those of you who aren't familiar with the Miami Heat superstar, we can forgive you if you misspell his first name, but seriously, it's on his birth certificate and driver's license as Dwyane Wade. What's even worse is that it's Dwyane Wade... Junior. That's right, it's a second-generation misspelling.
  • The city of Moncton, NB, Canada, was supposed to be named after a General Monkton. However, when the paper was released to announce the name, it was misspelled as Moncton, and apparently everyone was too embarrassed to fix it, and thus it stayed.
  • The city of Lee's Summit, MO was originally supposed to be Lea's Summit. Also a misspelling, but made worse by the fact that it was assumed to have been named after Robert E Lee, having been founded in the early 1870s.
  • Cleveland, Ohio was named for the town founder Moses Cleaveland, and spelled as such initially. But a newspaper dropped the second "a" because "Cleaveland" didn't fit on their masthead, but "Cleveland" did. The town followed suit.
  • Not necessarily a misspelling, but the town of Versailles, Ohio - while named for the French city of the same name - is commonly pronounced as "vur-saylz" because the region holds a significant population of German heritage. The downtown "Versailles Inn," however, is pronounced as "ver-sahy."
  • Pick an Alastor. Any Alistair. For every Alestaire with two As, there's five more Alisdairs with Ds. Aleistors the world over, we salute you and your ridiculous amount of ways to spell Alystor. Spot the Odd Name Out: Alastor is an unrelated name.
  • Willam Chakspere. Shaxberd. Shakspere. Shake-Spear. He's known to have spelled his own name at least a dozen different ways; other people have provided even more.
  • Georg/George Friedrich/Frideric/Frederick/Frederic Haendel/Händel/Handel
  • A particular variety of this is different Romanization: the currently popular system to translate Mandarin into English's alphabet is Pinyin, whereas the formerly popular (but less phonetically accurate) Wade-Giles system had been used before. This results in having to learn that Chiang Kai-shek was also Jiǎng Jieshi and Chiang Chieh-Shih - and that's his courtesy name rather than his real one!
    • Add extra confusion because the Romanised spellings of many Chinese people's names are based on spoken languages other than Mandarin.
  • A Fleming (well, Hainaulter, but who remembers where that is?) writing in French, Froissart uses some truly odd spellings of English, Scottish, and Spanish place names in his Chronicles. Like 'Asquessufort' for 'Oxford.' These are usually fixed in translation, though many are still indecipherable. Some might just be copyists' errors made while taking dictation.
  • One guy from '(The Customer is) Not Always Right' obviously doesn't know the other spellings of his name, we call him Pheven
  • This trope was intentionally invoked by future Formula One champion Nelson Piquet back when he was still in karting: in the first place, he used his mother's maiden name, Piquet, in the second, he spelled it 'Piket'. Both had been done to avoid detection by his father, who disapproved of Piquet karting.
  • The Assyrian/Akkadian word Ashur runs into issues, as it's spelled as Ashur, Assur, Aššur and A-šur, plus probably a few more. Considering it was one of their capitals and also chief god, it's a word that pops up all over the place, especially in the names of a lot of their kings. Therefore, you get things like the name Ashurbanipal in English, where the more correct (or as close as you can get) spelling would be Aššur-bāni-apli.
    • Half the problem with this seems to be either people not being able to type/print diacritics or simply pretending they do not exist.
  • Nietzsche. There is only one true way to spell it, but in order to learn it, one must be initiated in the Order of Artists' Philosophers.
  • Spelt/spelled, seen on this very page. (And be careful not to misspell "misspell" as "mispell", otherwise it will be misspelt and misspelled. There's nothing worse than misspelling "misspelling".)
  • Melonie Diaz, spelled like the fruit. Easy to remember, considering...
  • Actress Natascha McElhone. You will see it spelled without the C several times on this website.
    • What? Natascha Melhone?
  • Panettierre, Pannettiere, Panaterre, Panttiere... if this trope had a poster girl, she would be Hayden Panettiere (some spellings even have an "e" instead of the "a"). "Panetierre" is the most common one, used by The New York Times in their review of Scream 4, The BBC in this video of her on BBC Breakfast promoting Alpha and Omega, and the end credits of Bring it On: All or Nothing. And this is before we get to "Hayden Pannacotta," "Hayden Pantyliner," "Hayden Panties" and so on. If there's any remaining doubt that she owns this trope, read the two reviews below:
  • Serial Killer Ottis Toole.
  • There are a ridiculous number of people who spell Adolf Hitler's name with "ph" or mispronounce the A.
    • Not so ridiculous: during his lifetime, his name was spelled "Adolph" even by German embassies in English-speaking countries. It wasn't until well after World War II that non-English names were not routinely Anglicized.
  • The House of Habsburg/Hapsburg. Whilst the former is the traditional German spelling (and is thus used on Wikipedia, among others), the latter was the more common Anglicization until relatively recently.
  • The spirit distilled from grain and/or malt is generally spelled "whisky" in Scotland, Wales and England, and "whiskey" (with an E) in Ireland and much of the United States. To aficionados, this distinction can indeed be Serious Business.
  • Jake Gyllenhaal talks about it here. His name is misspelled various ways, most commonly Gyllenhall.
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