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During the construction of this website about Oradour-sur-Glane and its subsequent maintenance since it first opened on 10th March 2000, it has become apparent that certain words associated with the events surrounding Oradour have and still do, cause confusion as to their correct spelling. This short list shows the true spellings using British English on the left of the page in Navy text, along with their common misspellings to the right. See the FAQ list for some pronunciation details.
At the foot of this page is a list of the ALT codes needed on a UK English language keyboard to be able to print the various accents and umlauts used in both French and German words on this website.
Pronunciation details:
Oradour-sur-Glane is pronounced as: "Oradoor-sur-Glarn".
For guidance on how to pronounce some of the other names, both French and German mentioned in this website, see FAQ5
European date convention:
The date convention used throughout this website is that of Britain, France and Germany, so that 10-6-1944 means the 10th of June 1944 and not October 6th 1944. It is noteworthy that official documents written within the US military should also follow the British, French and German date convention; why this is I do not know.
English spelling convention:
All the English language spelling used on this website follows British English conventions, not American English; for example, "centre" not "center", "honour" not "honor", "colour" not "color", "armour" not "armor" and "favourites" not "favorites" (except for the references to the favicon on the page dealing with The Favicon for this website which follows the Microsoft American spelling and any American sourced documents, which are shown as they were originally received by the author).
Commonly misspelled words:
Diekmann ..... Dickmann, or Dieckmann, or Dikmann (these four spellings are common in the literature of Oradour and indeed Diekmann, Dickmann, Dieckmann and Dikmann are all valid surnames, as the reading of a German telephone directory will quickly show).
Führer ..... Fuhrer, or Fuehrer (the latter spelling shows the correct spelling without using the special umlaut ü character, which can be had by holding down the ALT key and entering 129 on the numeric keypad: see "Accents" below for more details)
Der Führer ..... Der Fuhrer, or Der Fuehrer (see note above for Führer).
Sturmbannführer ..... Sturmbannfuhrer, or Sturmbannfuehrer (see note above for Führer).
Kämpfe ..... Kampfe, or Kaempfe (the latter spelling is an attempt to give the correct pronunciation without the ä umlaut, which can had by holding down the ALT key and entering 132 on the numeric keypad).
Centre de la Mémoire ..... Centre de la Memoire (the é accent is given by holding down the ALT key and entering 130 on the numeric keypad).
Oradour-sur-Glane ..... Oradour sur Glane (I am taking the spelling and punctuation from the Michelin maps and guides as being correct and they show it with the hyphens. The literature from the Centre de la Mémoire in Oradour itself shows it with the hyphens, although it seems quite common for authors, even French ones, to spell it without).
In addition to the correct spelling of Oradour-sur-Glane as shown above, there have been a variety of misspellings input into the different search engines and some of the more common varieties are: oradoursurglane, glarne, oradour sur gléne, oradour-sur-gléne, gléen, orador sur glane, orador, ouradour, glen, orandour, oradur sur glan, oradur, oradeur, odore, oradour sur glaine, oradaur sur glane, oradaur, lane, oradour sur lane, oradout, avdour surglan, ordor, orland, orland sur glande, oradoer, orudou, aradour, oradour-sur-glâne, oradour sur glâne and others.
Accents:
Keyboard codes for French and German characters used on this website. To use these codes, hold down the ALT key to the right of the spacebar and enter the number shown using the Numeric Keypad (not the number keys along the top of the keyboard).
German characters ...
ä ..... ALT+132 Ä ..... ALT+142
ö ..... ALT+148 Ö ..... ALT+153
ü ..... ALT+129 Ü ..... ALT+154
It is worth noting that the umlauts are just a short-cut way of writing two characters in one, namely, ä for ae, ö for oe and ü for ue. This means that German can be typed correctly on a keyboard which does not have the special characters, such as an Enigma code machine for example.
ß ..... ALT+225 (This character is called the, "Eszett" and is used as a shorthand way of showing what would otherwise be, "ss" in written German). Note: this is not the same as the "Sig runes" used to denote the "SS" and as used in the, "Waffen-SS". The Sig Runes were never abbreviated and were always shown written out in full as, "SS" and never as "ß".
French characters ...
é ..... ALT+130 è ..... ALT+138 (In French it is common to write capital letters without accents).
There are more French accents than those shown above, if you want any more, do a search using your favourite search engine, with the words, "French Accents" in the search field and you will find plenty of websites detailing all the subtleties.
© Michael Williams ... revised Thursday, 25 August 2022