112 Ways to Spell 'Muammar Gaddafi'

How Do You Spell Muammar Gaddafi? Moammar Gadhafi? Momar Kaddafi? Keep Going...

The death of Muammar Gaddafi has reignited an old joke, as well as renewed quite a bit of newsroom hand-wringing: How do you spell Moammar Gadhafi's name?

In a news-consumption environment so heavily influenced by search, how you spell someone's name is the difference between your story getting traffic and fading into obscurity.

This is especially pertinent when dealing with names not normally spelled in English... such as that of Muammar Gaddafi.

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So, how do you spell "Muammar Gaddafi"? The accurate answer is: مُعَمَّر القَذَّافِي‎ (read right-to-left). However, if your Arabic is a bit rusty, you have to rely on transliteration, and that's where the confusion begins.

In 2009, ABC News came up with 112 different ways to spell "Muammar Gaddafi", some of which we will quote below.

The two most commonly-spelled versions in English news coverage are "Muammar Gaddafi" and "Moammar Gadhafi", but those are by no means the only ones used.