From 'Taleban' to 'Taliban'
It has been the News website's practice for a number of years to use the spelling "Taleban" in preference to the alternative "Taliban".
Neither version is wrong - what you come up with depends on which system of transliteration is used from the Arabic script. At the time we established our style, there was no consensus.
However, in recent years, a growing number of news outlets including Reuters, Associated Press, CNN, Al Jazeera, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post have all adopted "Taliban".
So too have institutions such as the United Nations and the US and UK governments. Indeed, the movement usually refers to itself as the "Taliban" when it uses English.
Further evidence of the emerging dominance of "Taliban" can be found through Google. Readers who use the search engine to look for "Taliban" will find well over 20 million references, while "Taleban" scores only about 1.25 million.
For these reasons, we have decided to switch our spelling to "Taliban" and other parts of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News operation have done the same.
The decision did create a potential problem with the website archive, but our technical team has come up with a solution which we hope will prove satisfactory. The two versions have been combined into one set of results, so that users entering "Taliban" or "Taleban" will get a list of results which should retrieve all the relevant articles. We have also altered the spelling in some important articles, .
Adam Curtis is the head of editorial standards, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Newsroom.