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Disk or disc? Trust Apple to know.

23rd Nov 2009
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 I always thought disk and disc were inter-changeable spellings for the same thing, but apparently I was wrong, and so is my old copy of the OED.

Apple explains in a support article that a disc refers to optical removable media, such as an audio CD, CD-ROM and DVD. They may or may not be re-writeable.

A disk on the other hand refers to magnetic media, such as a floppy disk, the disk in your computer's hard drive, or an external hard drive. Disks are always rewritable unless intentionally locked or write-protected.

What I want to know is, did they just make this up themselves or is this proper English? Does US English usage differ from UK English?

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By ianlawrance1
02nd Dec 2009 12:04

Disc or Disk....

Far be it from me to disagree with the mighty Apple, but I think their support article is rubbish (sorry, "may be falacious"), at least for the reasons they state.

I used to work for the even-mightier-back-then IBM, and there were only "disKs", presumably as the technology-speak was substantially American in origin. I always understood the difference to be linguistic...just one of many spelling differences between US English & our "local dialect"(!!!).... Back in those happy days, when we talked in kilobytes, magnetic technology was all we had (apart from punchcards & paper tape...). So DisK it was.

Could it be, however, that as the Optical technology was originally developed in Europe (by Philips?), it inherited what some of us might consider to be the "correct" spelling...disC?

Just like "program"...accepted as the term for a computer executable, and "programme": every other meaning of the word, in Europe, anyway.....?

If you set your Word-Processor language to US-English temporarily, you'll soon find more differences than you might imagine (or desire!)....

 

 

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By alexsingletonuk
23rd May 2011 19:45

Latin or Greek

My Latin and IT teacher at school in the early 90s reckoned the spelling was determined by whether you derived the word from Latin or Greek.

There are those who say that disc is British, and disk is American (not least because Acorn and Amstrad always referred to discs, while Windows referred to disks). Nowadays, though, a CD is always a disc. Maybe that comes from the Compact Disc logo being trademarked.

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