With more than 10 variations on the same holiday, it’s not easy to know which spelling is the right one.
Thanks to comedian Adam Sandler, many people know that the Jewish festival of lights lasts eight nights. However, there’s a bit of confusion among Jews and Gentiles alike as to how to spell the winter holiday.
Is it Chanukah? Hanukkah? Hannukah? It’s not easy to figure out how many n’s and k’s there are and if there’s a c before the h. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, there’s no definitive right answer.
Unlike Christmas, which has one spelling in the English language, Hanukkah’s story is a bit more complicated because it has to do with transliteration. A transliteration gives a person an idea of how a word in a foreign language is pronounced. It changes the letters of the word’s original alphabet into similar-sounding letters of a different language’s alphabet.
Written in Hebrew, the holiday is spelled, חנוכה. Pronounced with the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, chet, a guttural, throaty sound similar to the “ch” in Johann Brach, according to Chabad. This led to the spelling of the holiday with a “ch” as Chanukah. However, the closest sounding letter in the English alphabet is “h,” which prompted the spelling of the holiday as “Hanukkah.
