You say Hizbullah, I say Hezbollah

How can we possibly expect peace in the Middle East when we can't even agree on this...

Britain's Fourth Estate is split - as is the rest of the world's media - over the correct spelling of the Lebanese-based political party and militia. The result? Chaos to rival the crisis itself.

The Times and the BBC go with Hezbollah as does the US triumvirate of CNN, Fox News and The New York Times.

The Guardian elects to use Hizbullah, echoing the Daily Star of Beirut, the leading English-language paper in the region. Oddly defiant the Guardian's sister title, The Observer, chooses Hizbollah, as do the Daily Telegarph and The Independent. Al Jazeera goes, perhaps unsurprisingly, with the more exact arabic transliteration, Hizb Allah.

Wikipedia's army of amateur experts note: "The name حزب الله is transliterated from the Arabic in a number of ways. An exact transliteration would be hizbu' llāh."

Which only gets us so far.

So what to do? Let's test that very Web 2.0 notion - 'the wisdom of crowds'. Or put it another way, what's winning the popular vote in the blogoshpere? A quick trawl through tags on Flickr and Del.icio.us (to take two collaborative sites at random) reveal:

1. Hezbollah (Del.icio.us 417 Flickr 51)

2. Hizbullah (Del.icio.us 120 Flickr 3)

3. Hizbollah (Del.icio.us 84 Flickr 5)

4. Hizb Allah (Del.icio.us 4 Flickr 0)

The choice, is yours…

See also: Refugees stream across the Syrian border

See also: Lebanese bloggers on the Israeli attacks

Comments

[Jana]

And what does Channel Four / More 4 use? I'm reckon I've seen it at least two ways already.

[George Thomas]

Let's call the whole thing off.