The Authentic Orthography
Sacred City, Alternative name · Same as Varanasi
Why benarés.com is the correct form
बेनर्éस्
The name in its original Devanagari form. बेनर्éस् → Benarés. Sanskrit Benarés is written in Devanagari as बेनर्éस् · IAST transliteration maps each Devanagari vowel and consonant to a Latin equivalent · Macrons mark long vowels (ā, ī, ū); dots beneath consonants mark retroflex articulation (ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ)
BENARES
Stripped of its identity, the name was reduced to plain Latin letters. The original orthography — stress, length, breathing — was erased by systems that only understand A-Z.
Benarés
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
benarés.com → xn--benars-fva.com
The non-ASCII characters in Benarés are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Benarés.
How benares becomes Benarés
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | b | → | B | Same | Same, capitalized |
| 02 | e | → | e | Same | Same |
| 03 | n | → | n | Same | Same |
| 04 | a | → | a | Same | Same |
| 05 | r | → | r | Same | Same |
| 06 | e | → | é | Stress | Stress on e |
| 07 | s | → | s | Same | Same |
Why Benarés is classified as Tier-2 Accent-Preserving
The Sanskrit original बेनर्éस् contains only stress (acute accent). This makes it a single-tier Tier-2 name. The Unicode restoration preserves what can be preserved — honoring the single feature that distinguishes it from plain ASCII.
See how Benarés behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
benares
→
Benarés