Disc or disk (spelling)

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The two spellings of the word disc or disk are partly due to the way in which the words originated. 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^[1]. 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 1940s, when the American company IBM pioneered the first hard disk storage devices, the k-spelling was used. In 1979 the Dutch company Philips, along with Sony, developed the compact disc medium; here, the c-spelling was chosen, possibly because of the predominating British spelling, or because the compact disc was seen as a successor to the analogue disc record. One explanation is the fact that the spelling disc is acceptable to the French, just as Philips introduced the compact audio cassette in the 1960s under a French name, too.

Whatever their heritage, 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), or is taken to refer to an object constructed from discs rather than a disc itself). The c-spelling is then used for optical media such as the compact disc and similar technologies (Apple Inc. considers this official^[2]). Even in the computing field, however, the terms are used inconsistently; software documentation often using one or the other spelling exclusively.

Beyond the realm of technical terminology, usage generally follows local spelling patterns and preferences.