DES MOINES — Across the face of Todd Bratten crept the queasy expression of a person trying to utter a word he does not know how to pronounce.

“Oh, I’ll take a stab,” he said, moments before boarding a plane in Atlanta. “BUTT-i-judge?”

It has been many months since former Mayor Pete Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge) of South Bend, Ind., announced that he was considering running for president, many months since Chris Wallace called him “Pete BOOT-i-jadge” on Fox News, and many months since the public was introduced to the name’s confounding sequence of G’s and unusual (unless you are from Malta) configuration of vowels.

You would think that voters would get it by now. But when The New York Times posted an online quiz in December testing respondents’ ability to recognize public figures from their photographs, less than one third of those who successfully identified Mr. Buttigieg were able to spell his name correctly.

Although misspellings were not unusual in the survey — someone wrote “Beonyce” for Beyoncé, for instance — Buttigieg generated an impressive 167 variations, suggesting that whatever the respondents thought the name was, maybe by reverse-engineering what they thought it sounded like, they were wrong.