Commonly mispronounced words 5 - Zanjeer

A reader of this blog had left a comment asking me to give links of an Urdu Dictionary which is written in Devanagari or Roman script. Now that set me thinking. The problem with the internet is there is an abundance of information but there is no way of checking the credibility. Now before I put anything up here, I check and I double check, but in spite of that I am mortally scared of an error creeping in. But there are many others who don't care. Let me give you an example. Prakash Mehra died on 17th May 2009. Only I know how many times I would have winced when some TV/radio presenter pronounced one of his greatest hits as 'zanzeer'. And this included some seasoned presenters too. Now I decided to check it out online. I searched for the word 'ज़ंज़ीर' on google. I found 155 pages spelling it like that. Then I typed 'ज़ंजीर' and found 8030 hits. Finally I typed 'जंजीर' and found 22300 hits. Anyone who did not know the right answer and searched all three options would have come to the conclusion that the right word is 'janjeer'. Democracy is dangerous. And then there would be those, who would hear some media person calling it 'zanzeer' and just do a google search to confirm. He would find 155 pages and think that must be the right spelling.

This is a word which has been constantly mispronounced over the years - being such a popular film. However, Prakash Mehra's recent death just made the wound fresh once more.

So if you are reading this and are in a position where the way you pronounce a word is likely to be heard by more than 1000 people, please, please, make some effort to check out the pronunciation before going out and institutionalising errors.