The Authentic Orthography
Sacred City, Shiva, Ganges · Between Varana and Asi
Why vārāṇasī.com is the correct form
वाराणसी
The name in its original Devanagari form. वाराणसी → Vārāṇasī. Sanskrit Vārāṇasī is written in Devanagari as वाराणसी · 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)
VARANASI
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.
Vārāṇasī
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
vārāṇasī.com → xn--vras-qsab01as96r.com
The non-ASCII characters in Vārāṇasī are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Vārāṇasī.
How varanasi becomes Vārāṇasī
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | v | → | V | Same | Same, capitalized |
| 02 | a | → | ā | Length | Long vowel |
| 03 | r | → | r | Same | Same |
| 04 | a | → | ā | Length | Long vowel |
| 05 | n | → | ṇ | Special | N with dot: retroflex n |
| 06 | a | → | a | Same | Same |
| 07 | s | → | s | Same | Same |
| 08 | i | → | ī | Length | Long vowel |
Why Vārāṇasī is classified as Tier-1 Macron-Preserving
The Sanskrit name वाराणसी is represented by its most canonical scholarly spelling. For non-Greek names, Tier-1 status reflects the definitive attested restoration rather than Greek-style stress/length features. This is the authoritative Unicode form — a single-tier Tier-1 name.
See how Vārāṇasī behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
varanasi
→
Vārāṇasī