Separated by a Common Language

I (BrE, spending virtually no time apart from televisually with Americans) agree with Better Half - 'a dice' sounds very wrong to me (and reads wronger still), but I know that a lot of people use it. I would always use 'a die', but not without a certain flicker of self-consciousness at my 'correctness' and apprehension of exciting comment if in unknown company... It's a no-win situation :o)
It's not that surprising that 'die' is unfamiliar to many people because it's comparatively infrequent to refer to the things in the singular, and the verb 'to dice' is surely much more common than the noun (one of the rare things we do with both death and vegetables).
For what it's worth, when I as a child first heard the saying 'the die is cast' I thought it was 'dye' and meant something like 'the dye has taken', 'the colour is fixed', 'your trousers are going to be bright pink now and there's no going back'. (Then I learnt Latin and the less colourful but more historically interesting truth that it comes from Caesar's reported comment as he crossed the Rubicon to trigger the Roman civil war.)

BH thanks you for your support, pj.

The short answer for Kathy is that mouse is a Germanic word (coming from Old English and its ancestors) that was subject to plurali{s/z}ation by umlaut (the source of many of English's irregular plurals) and dice comes to us from Old French dé and dés. The question is why that came to be die and dice not dies, which has to do with the facts that (a) the French plural form was already being used as a singular in English so the 's' was not perceived as the plural '-s' and so it was spelled otherwise, and (b) the word was subjected to various sound changes. See the OED for more info if you need it...

I think that people who have no involvement in board/role playing games would generally use dice for singular and plural in my part of the world. I'm fairly certain that only people trying to be pedantic would bother correcting a singular "dice" in spoken usage.

I always assumed that "the die is cast" referred to die casting (a form of metal casting).

But in that case, the die does the casting, rather than being cast...

The original "the die is cast" is said to have come from Julius Ceasar, on (literally and figuratively) crossing the Rubicon. The "die" is the (according to the AHD, now obsolete in both the UK and USA) singular form of "dice", and "cast" refers to that dice having been thrown. "A chance has been taken, and the result will be irreversable" is the full meaning, but mostly people just mean the "the result is irreversable" part.

Which edition of the AHD do you have? It doesn't say this in the on-line version (not at the office today with my hard copy) and it's certainly not true. Obsolete is a very strong word!

Just checked AHD 4th edn in print, and nowhere does it say that die is obsolete. In fact, it doesn't even offer dice as a singular referring to the gaming cube (though it does offer it for a diced piece of food). So, according to AHD die is the singular of dice and that's that.

Darth, did you not mean the American Heritage Dictionary when you wroteAHD?

Would Ms Guist care to comment on the derivation of the phrase, "as straight as a die"?

Is this related to gaming, or are its antecedents elsewhere?

That's the cutting kind of die. See here for more.

Ms Guist is most kind.

It's always been 'a dice' in my (british) family. I thought about taking up 'die' when I became aware of it as a kid but decided (wrongly, obviously) that it was probably based on the same type of error i'd made as a little kid (and been told of so many times that i can't now tell if it's amusing or not; if not - sorry!): Apparently, my Mum was getting some flowers in from the garden and said something about fetching a vase to put them in. Showing myself as a pedant even at aged 3(ish), i told her, 'No, just one va'. Oh dear.

This adds to the evidence that linguists are born, not made!

As Ambrose Bierce said:
A cube of cheese no bigger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

This sent me to my ipod to check with Bob Dylan. I'm sure I remember the lyrics of 'The times, they are a-changin' as 'the line it is drawn/the dice it is cast'.
Alas! It is 'the curse it is cast', whoever heard of casting a curse anyway?

What's the concensus on 'data'? I vote for mass noun.

I treat data as a plural whenever I can. Just to make it feel more important.

Casting a curse, I would think, is like casting a spell. Over 31,000 google hits for casting a curse and nearly 10,000 for cast a curse.

The full Bierce entry combines all of these confusions into a single compact source:

DIE, n.

The singular of "dice." We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, "Never say die." At long intervals, however, some one says: "The die is cast," which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:

A cube of cheese no larger than a die / May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

--The Devil's Dictionary

I'm an American ex-pat living in Oz now, and have just recently joined a role-playing organisation here. We are all much more comfortable with the singular die. I've been enjoying reading this blog for months now, but I must admit I'm afeared of not having enough schooling to post a comment.

No schooling necessary for commenting. You just need to speak a language!

I first discovered that "die" is the singular of "dice" when I studied probability theory at university. Using "dice" as a singular noun just sounds so wrong. People who study probability theory typically go on to become statisticians and then learn that "datum" is the singular to "data." But even fewer people know this and often use "data" for both singular and plural and it
has become common usage (at least in the US).

Just a thought, but from what I can remember, Rhinehart's character in The Dice Man uses two dice to make his decisions for most of the book.

Okay, so the commenter in the Grauniad wrote 'rolling a dice' not 'rolling dice', but I thought it worth mentioning.

Apologies for commenting on such an old post. I've only recently discovered the site and I've been traipsing through the archives during this last week to soothe the pedantic monster that slumbers within.

Keep up the good work.

J

Hi! I came across this great explanation when I joked with My Own BH that the plural of lie must then be lice. (She was not amused.)
So, are there any other plurals that take the "-ce" ending? Except for leading me here, El Goog has been unhelpful.

It's been said that the plural of spouse is spice, though I suspect the experience of actual polygamists doesn't really bear this out.

I'd never heard of "die" until I played a game with American friends as a child... but then some very proper English gentleman with good (BrE!) public school educations assured me it was "die", so I'm not sure!

I grew up using 'die' as the singular for 'dice' (speaking a mish-mash of BrE and CanE). But for 'the die is cast' I always thought that the 'die' in question was the metal kind one uses to cut things, so if the die is cast (in metal) one can't change the shape of what it's going to make...I suppose I must have been mistaken.

One thing that strikes me in the sentence you quote, more than the die-versus-dice issue, is the troubling use of "eponymous". Since the main character in The Dice Man is called Luke Rhinehart, how can he be called eponymous in any way?

I spent a substantial part of my life as a die
-sinker ( in England may I add ). And, somewhat confusingly, always produced a pair of dies! .... BR.

I'm not entirely familiar with "hie" so I looked it up to clarify, and your use of it ("...which I hie to the recycling while wrinkling my nose") seems to be missing a preposition.

Based on the sources I looked at I would only use hie in that fashion in reference to an animal or possibly to machine I wished to personify.

I do find interesting the similarity in meaning and sound of hie and hightail, given they have entirely different origins.


P.S. Wrinkling your nose in disgust? That seems a bit harsh, unless some athletic star was captured in illicit debauchery.

Oddly enough, I've recently seen several instances of the phrase "the die were cast." I.e., instead of dice being used in the singular, die is being used in the plural! The most recent example of this is in the very new book "The Godless" by Ben Peek. After seeing it there, I did a search on the internet and found several other examples of this usage.

Since we seem short on Americans here, I'll chime in to note that everyone I've gamed with here cringes and mutters each and every single time we read "roll a dice" in an English rulebook. Being wrong for over 600 years doesn't make you less wrong! Colonists are supposed to be the ones breaking the language. I've never heard an American use "dice" as singular.

I'm amazed to read that some British speakers say die. I don't remember ever hearing the it spoken by a Brit — except when discussing the word as opposed to the thing.

Yes, we say The die is cast, but how many of us realise that it refers to dice? I had no idea until I learnt as a schoolboy about Caesar's words in Latin, and the way they are translated into English. A odd translation, since we never speak of casting dice. And an odd metaphor for our culture, since we don't think of a throw as irreversible. The way we use dice in games it would just never occur to us to say 'Can I have that throw again?'.

And surely dice is a collective — a bit like cattle — rather than a plural. It's a total violation of the way English plurals sound. If the final sound of the singular form is a vowel, then the plural form must end in a Z-sound.

Hooray! The OED agrees with me:

QUOTE
As in pence, the plural s retains its original breath sound, probably because these words were not felt as ordinary plurals, but as collective words; compare the original plural truce, where the collective sense has now passed into a singular. This pronunciation is indicated in later spelling by -ce
UNQUOTE

I hadn't made the connection with pence before, but it does make a lot of sense.

I believe you can call a coin a penny even though the name belongs to a foreign currency. Before 1971 we had just the one coin called a penny, and the plural was pennies. That coined was abolished and replaced by something that was round and brown but otherwise bore no resemblance to an old penny. The old 1d was worth a 240th of a pound, the new 1p is a cent by another name.

But a penny was also the value of a penny coin. If that value was more then 1, we use not the plural pennies but the collective pence.

For many in my generation, and for others influence by the way we speak, the word penny has disappeared (except for old coins) in exactly the same way that die just don't belong in the lexicon. We say one pee or — and this is a precise analogy to once dice — one pence.

Is there any evidence that "die" is a middle-class signifier? Growing up in the northeastern U.S., I was taught the singular "die," but noticed my slightly-better-heeled step-siblings said "dice."

One pence is obviously wrong. Just look st the coin, it states on it 'one penny'.

Nobody does look at it. It's one pee or one pence. A penny is something that was abolished back in the 1970's.

Grew up in Australia, and always used 'dice' for singular or plural for games with family members or friends. My mother, who was fairly careful (traditional? conservative?) with her language, never corrected us. As far as I recall, I first encountered the singular form 'die' when I was doing maths in secondary school in the 1970s.

I wonder if "die" is avoided due to its association with death

Coming to this in February 2020 from the thread on Dicing with Death, I wonder if the problem might be with the sound of the 's'. If the singular is 'die', the regular plural would be 'dies' with a 'z' sound, as it is in the Anonymous post of the former die-sinker on 27th July 2013. That is the same as the plural of 'lie' and 'tie'. It is the normal usage when 'die' has its metal-working meaning.

'Dice' though, has an 's' sound - or at least, it does in Br-English. So that conveys the impression to the casual speaker who learns by listening and speaking and hears 'dice' first, as they will have done, that it is not a plural of a singular word 'die'.

So in Br-English usage, it would either be an irregular plural, or one of those irregular words like 'sheep' where the plural is the same as the singular. Br-English has more or less unanimously now gone for the latter.

There's another question though. In Am-English is the 's' in 'dice' a 'z', the regular form, or 's', the irregular one?

'Dice' has been used as a singular for so long that when it was first used that way the plural -s was pronounced /s/, not /z/. 'Bodice' is another example, originally being the plural of 'body'. The pronunciation then influenced the spelling.
I discovered sometime during childhood that the 'correct' singular of 'dice' was 'die'. (My education at that stage inclined towards the prescriptive.) My big sister didn't half mock me when I used it during a board game.

"Die" as singular is used a lot among tabletop roleplayers. E.g. "Roll a six-sided die." (Or in tabletop slang, a d6.) We seem to be about the only people who still use it that way. ='D