Language desk
< April 21	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 23 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 22

Advise (n.)

More and more I'm seeing people using the word 'advise' as a noun, e.g. We are not permitted to give legal advise.

Is this a recognised spelling now? -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 06:23, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, just a spelling mistake, though it will eventually become acceptable if enough people continue with the error. Ask again in a hundred years! Dbfirs 06:56, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, OK then. I expect User:Wavelength will be on hand to remind me of my earlier question, link and all. Thanks. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 07:51, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well I guessed that you had a subtle reason for asking, but I still can't see what it was. Which wavelength are you on? Dbfirs 11:07, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you're seeing things that aren't there. I had no subtle reason for asking, just a simple curiosity driven by a pattern of usage by various people, none of whom was Wavelength. I mentioned that editor solely because he/she is an unending fount of knowledge about previous threads on similar topics, and if I were to ask again in 100 years time, I would have forgotten this thread but Wavelength wouldn't. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 11:32, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I must be getting too suspicious in my old age! I see what you mean about the frequency of the error. I've just corrected over 20 examples of the mistake in Wikipedia articles, and there are probably many more (I'm just waiting for Google to catch up on my corrections). Thanks for shining light on the issue. Dbfirs 13:00, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

NB This is an example of a general rule, to which American English provides more exceptions than British English: s for verbs, c for nouns: prophesy/prophecy, practise/practice, etc. AlexTiefling (talk) 08:10, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yet Americans don't generally honour the practise/practice, license/licence etc differences, while UKers do. Or is that what you're saying? -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 08:15, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's also interesting (possibly) that there are words for which such a distinction is made in pronunciation, but not in spelling (use, house). I suppose the reason that advice/advise survives more strongly than practice/practise, say, is that the difference can be heard as well as seen. Victor Yus (talk) 09:47, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This might be akin to the ever-more-common use of "invite" as a noun. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:50, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's always been a common colloquialism, with cites in the OED going back to 1659. Dbfirs 13:04, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that Americans are less likely make the advise=advice mistake, because American spelling of these forms is based mainly on pronunciation, which is easier to remember than an abstract rule that you use s for verbs and c for nouns. Marco polo (talk) 14:22, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that Americans are more likely make the advise=advice mistake, because American spelling permits the tool pronounced vice to be spelled vise – .Sussexonian (talk) 20:29, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, interesting. But wouldn't more-readily-brought-to-mind analogies be the "Vice President" or the "vice squad"? Nobody in the history of the world has ever spelt these as "Vise President" or "vise squad", have they? There's also vice-versa. Now, a lot of people do write "visa-versa", but never "vise-versa", which is odd since the "vice" pronunciation dominates the "visa" one. (I've just discovered that the Romans would have pronounced this close to "Wiki-wersa".) -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 20:54, 22 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting indeed. I've never actually seen "visa-versa" written as such, though I've heard it pronounced that way plenty of times. Could that spelling just be an Australian thing? Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 04:21, 23 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Here are close to 1 million hits for "visa versa". I'm sure there's some antipodean content, but not predominantly so. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 04:40, 23 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]