I now do not remember where I took this photo of a museum label. Some museum I've been to in the UK in the last couple of years. It's been sitting on my computer desktop to remind me to blog about practice and practise. Maybe it's for the best that I don't remember, as to mention them would feel like naming and shaming, since practise there is spel{led/t} wrong.
Let's start with the spelling facts:
- In standard British spelling, the noun is practice and the verb is practise (in that picture it's a noun, and therefore should have a 'c'). If you need to remember which is which, think of advice and advise: the noun has 'c' and the verb has 's'. What's different, of course, is that advice and advise are pronounced differently. The letter 'c' usually doesn't represent the /z/ sound that you get in 'advise' (but the letter 's' often does). Practi{c/s}e is confusing because they're both pronounced the same, even though they're spel{led/t} differently. That is to say, they're homophones.
Historical aside from the OED:The word was originally stressed on the second syllable [...], and this is still the case in some regional varieties, especially in Scots (hence such spellings as practize, practeeze, practeese). The stress was subsequently shifted to the first syllable, with devoicing of the final consonant, probably by association with practice n.
- In standard American spelling, they're both practice. Noah Webster promoted dropping practise in his 1828 dictionary (and probably elsewhere), arguing that "[t]he orthography of the verb ought to be the same as of the noun; as in notice and to notice.]" But, like most of Webster's spellings, it didn't really take off in the US until after he was gone—in the late 19th century.
So, to test what's happening, I looked, as I like to do, for objective evidence—not filtered through my (or anyone else's) biased attention for one type of error or the other in everyday life. To do that, I looked up practice and practise in the British portion of the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE), asked it to give me a random sample of 200 passages with each spelling, and then read each and identified any spelling errors (using the British rules). That is, I looked for nouns in the practise data and verbs in the practice data.
The result:
Of 200 British cases of the spelling practise, 65 were misspelled nouns.
Of 200 British cases of the spelling practice, 23 were misspelled verbs.
At the bottom of this post, I'll stick in screenshots of the data so you can see some examples.
Now, I am not convinced that people were ever good at keeping these spellings straight. Some people were, sure, but homonyms have given people trouble since people started standardi{s/z}ing spelling. We'd need some more historical data to see if this is the pattern of error has always been this way. But at least now, at least in this web-based data, there's less evidence of Americani{s/z}ation of British spelling and more evidence of counter-Americani{s/z}ation—people using the spelling they perceive as not-American, even though it's not the right spelling for standard British English.
Before I go: Some people say to me "I didn't know you were in my town! I would have come to see you talk if I'd known!" I keep my talk schedule posted here. If you're in Brighton or London (UK) in the next few weeks or the DC/Maryland area in August, have/take a look at the schedule and see if you can join us!
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| Some noun practises on UK websites (click to enlarge) |
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| Some verb practices on UK websites (click to enlarge) |
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