I like to keep informed on world affairs. What’s transpiring across the Middle East has a lot of people’s attention. But one thing that has always perplexed me is why there are so many spellings for Moammar Gaddafi, and why we can’t agree on one and dispense with the rest. We don’t seem to struggle with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s or Hosni Mubarak’s name. It would be nice if the Libyan leader could set it straight for the English speaking world. But it probably doesn’t matter, as it appears we soon won’t have to write about him much anymore.

I was wondering how people were spelling it on Twitter, so I came up with a way to find out. So what are we calling Gadafi Kadhafi the ruler of Libya? Here are the results in infographic form.

I didn’t spend a lot of time doing this so my methodology wasn’t very scientific. I quickly compiled a list of all the versions I could find being used by various news sources. Next I performed a separate search on each spelling variation, confined the results to New York City and recorded the total number of references within the last 10 hours.