I'll accept just about any spelling for djinnis and efrits because they are translated from another language and another time... with a totally different alphabet. How Perkins hears the word is different from how Perlman hears the word is different from how Perriman hears the word... and they are all trying to write it in English, another mutable language, after passing it through a few other tongues. "The Tales of the Thousand and One Nights" were known as a collected body throughout all the Near East and across North Africa a thousand years ago. The individual tales are much older (Homer was acquainted with a few of them). If there was a trade route, there were talkative people gathered along it. More than spices and fabrics were carried from exotic lands. All those voices and all those languages... and no one true spelling. The written form of a word is important. It is a record, and, with other variations of that word, provides information about what is known by a people at a given point in their history. But it is dead and embalmed. An anology would be a skeleton of a saber-toothed cat perfect under glass compared to the living cats with all their grace and all their clumsiness and all their vitality. I wouldn't trade my cat for a museum worth of bones, nor would I want the spoken flexible mutable words of our language to be frozen by some committee. Carolly, Occasional Member of the Spelling Police