Philip B. Corbett is the associate masthead editor for standards and oversees The Times’s style manual.
When a terrible earthquake hit Nepal on April 25, our correspondents quickly began to report from the battered capital, Katmandu. By the beginning of this week, we were still reporting on the quake’s aftermath, but under a slightly different dateline: Kathmandu.
Why the switch?
There are many examples of foreign place names with more than one English rendering, especially if the local language uses a different alphabet, requiring the name to be transliterated for English. Times editors want
to use the version likely to be most familiar to our readers. Normally, for consistency, we use the spelling listed first in our preferred newsroom dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary. In some
cases, we also consider what version is used by The Associated Press and other international news organizations with an English-speaking audience.
For Nepal’s capital, the “Katmandu” spelling has long been widely used in English-language publications, and may still be more familiar to some American readers. But “Kathmandu,” with an “h” in the middle, has become more widespread in recent years, reflecting the preferred local usage.
Until recently, Webster’s New World and The A.P. both used “Katmandu,” and The Times specified that spelling in our style manual. But in its Fifth Edition, published last year, Webster’s New World switched, listing “Kathmandu” as the primary spelling and “Katmandu” as a variant. Then, as coverage of the earthquake dominated headlines last week, the stylebook editors at The A.P. — who also use Webster’s New World College as their primary dictionary — announced that they were changing their style to “Kathmandu.”
Our researchers found that at this point, most American and British publications were also using Kathmandu, though a few were inconsistent and others (including The Wall Street Journal) still used “Katmandu.” We also realized that the spelling with “h” was a far more common search term in Google.
Given the switch by Webster’s New World and The A.P., Times editors agreed that we should adopt “Kathmandu” as well, which we did as of Monday.
Before the switch, we had heard from a few puzzled readers who insisted that “Katmandu” was simply wrong. If only these spelling and style issues were that simple! It may seem that the preferred local spelling of a foreign place name would always be correct. But of course that’s not necessarily the case — readers in English are often more familiar with Anglicized versions. Times readers would no doubt be taken aback if we started to report on events in Roma or München.