Reference library
Practical guides, comparisons, and reference notes for navigating romanization systems.
The same name or word can appear in several different Roman-letter spellings. 北京 may be written Beijing, Peking, or Pei-ching. The Japanese word し may become shi or si. 부산 appears officially as Busan, while older sources commonly use Pusan. The Russian name Чайковский may appear as Čajkovskij, Chaĭkovskiĭ, Chaykovskiy, or the established English form […]
A romanized word may look correct on screen while being stored incorrectly underneath. The character é, for example, can be encoded as one precomposed Unicode character or as the letter e followed by a combining acute accent. These forms may render identically, but software that compares their raw code-unit sequences can treat them as different […]
A book title written in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Hindi, or another non-Latin script may need a Roman-letter form before it can be searched, sorted, cited, shelved, or exchanged consistently across library systems. That is the problem the ALA-LC Romanization Tables are designed to solve. The tables provide standardized rules for converting text from […]
A place can have several legitimate names in Roman letters. 北京 is internationally written Beijing, but historical English sources often use Peking. Москва may be romanized as Moskva, while English convention uses Moscow. القاهرة can become Al Qāhirah under a formal Arabic geographic-name system, yet English maps generally label it Cairo. 부산 is officially Busan […]
A personal name is not merely a word that can be converted mechanically from one alphabet into another. It is also an identity label connected to passports, education records, professional work, publications, financial accounts, family traditions, immigration files, and personal preference. For that reason, one name may legitimately have several Latin-script forms. The Korean surname […]
A single Sanskrit word may be written in several South Asian scripts while retaining essentially the same linguistic form. For example, the Sanskrit word dharma may appear as: Script Form Devanagari धर्म Bengali ধর্ম Gujarati ધર્મ Gurmukhi ਧਰਮ Kannada ಧರ್ಮ Malayalam ധർമ്മ Odia ଧର୍ମ Tamil தர்ம Telugu ధర్మ Sinhala ධර්ම Latin transliteration dharma This apparent […]
Explore why the Chinese capital was historically spelled “Peking,” the romanization systems behind it, and the modern rules that guide how Beijing is written in English today.
Arabic words can appear very different when written in Roman letters. The Arabic word العربية may be represented as al-ʻArabīyah, al-ʿArabiyya, al-ʿarabīya, or simply al-Arabiya. القاهرة can appear as al-Qāhirah, Al Qāhirah, Cairo, or a dialect-influenced spelling. محمد is commonly written Muhammad, but established variants include Mohammed, Mohamed, Mohammad, and Mehmet in other linguistic traditions. […]
A Cyrillic name can appear very different when converted into Roman letters. The Russian surname Ельцин may be represented as Elʹcin, Elʹt͡sin, or Yel’tsin. Чайковский can become Čajkovskij, Chaĭkovskiĭ, or Chaykovskiy. The Ukrainian capital Київ may appear as Kyiv, while older international sources often use Kiev. These differences are not merely spelling preferences. They come […]
The Korean word 한국 may appear in Roman letters as Hanguk, Han’guk, or Hankwuk. 서울 may be written Seoul, Sŏul, or Sewul. The city 부산 appears officially as Busan, but many historical publications use Pusan. These forms are not random spelling variations. They come from different systems for representing Korean in the Latin alphabet. The […]