No news story regarding Libya can pass without the correct spelling of the name of the country’s dictator — excuse me, Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, as his official honorific puts it — being questioned extensively.

As Greg Pollowitz of National Review recently wondered on Twitter, why do there appear to be something like 17 different spellings for his name? I mean, my name is spelled correctly just one way, as is yours. So why the confusion over the name of Libya’s dictator?

The answer lies in Arabic, the language Gaddafi and his people speak. Wikipedia gets it right:

Because of the lack of standardization of transliterating written- and regionally-pronounced Arabic, Gaddafi’s name has been transliterated in many different ways into English and other Latin alphabet languages. Even though the Arabic spelling of a word does not change, the pronunciation may vary in different varieties of Arabic, which may cause a different romanization.

There’s no single spelling because his name doesn’t romanize directly from Arabic. It’s also the reason why we have just as many spellings for Osama Bin Laden (Usama Bin Laden, Usama Bin Ladin, Ussamah Bin Ladin, etc.) as we do for Gaddafi.

So, which way should you spell it? Really, whichever way you want. Some variations, along with the primary user:

• Muammar Qaddafi (CBS News)
• Moammar Gaddafi (Washington Post)
• Muammar el-Qaddafi (New York Times)
• Moammar Gadhafi (Associated Press)
• Muammar Gaddafi (Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera)
• Muammar al-Gaddafi (Wikipedia)
• Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi (US State Department)
• Muammar Khaddafi (Xinhua)

Of special note: Hasn’t Gaddafi spelled his own name in English, you ask? Yes. But apparently even he’s confused. In a letter to an American school back in the 1980s, he supposedly spelled his name “Moammar El-Gadhafi”. But on his official website now, he spells it “Muammar Al Gathafi”. So even he’s not sure.