The earlier word is disk, which came into the English language in the middle of the 17th century, and (probably following pre-existing words such as risk) it was spelled with a k. The spelling disc was introduced in the 18th century, following an increasing tendency to base the spelling of words on their roots: in this case the Latin word discus and the Greek word δισκος (note that kappa in Greek is usually transliterated by c rather than k). In the 19th century, disc became the conventional spelling for audio recordings made on a flat plate, such as the gramophone record; this usage gave rise to the modern term disc jockey. Early BBC technicians differentiated between disks (in-house transcription records) and discs (the colloquial term for commercial gramophone records, or what the BBC dubbed CGRs).
By the 20th century, the c-spelling was more popular in British English, while the k-spelling was preferred in American English. In the 1950s, when the American company IBM pioneered the first hard disk drive storage devices, the k-spelling was used. Consequently, in computer jargon today it is common for the k-spelling to refer mainly to magnetic storage devices (particularly in British English, where the term disk is sometimes regarded as an abbreviation for diskette (a much later word).
Some latter-day storage device manufacturers prefer the c-spelling. In 1979 the Dutch company Philips, along with Sony, developed the compact disc medium; here, the c-spelling was chosen. The c-spelling is now used consistently for optical media such as the compact disc and similar technologies; Apple Inc. considers this usage to be official.
See also
References
Further reading
- What is the Difference Between a Disc and a Disk?, article at wiseGEEK.com
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Last updated on Sunday July 06, 2008 at 22:45:26 PDT (GMT -0700)
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