2685: Skeptic or Sceptic? Apr 27, 2024

If you’re skeptical about what’s in your septic tank, you wouldn’t be the only one. In fact, it is primarily for this reason of not associating the word ‘sceptic’ with ‘septic’ that the American spelling is with a K (i.e. ‘skeptic’) while in Britain etc. it is with a C. There is another problem, however, looking at the British spelling, which is that normally a word beginning SC- before I or E is not pronounced this way, as in ‘science’ or ‘scene’. Of course, in Latin it was pronounced, but that is certainly not what people expect looking at a word like that.

So why then do Commonwealth countries spell it with the C at the beginning? Because in French ‘sceptique’, where the word comes from, it was not pronounced, and would have joined the ranks of ‘science’ and ‘scene’, were it not for a change in pronunciation with the C pronounced /k/, through a basically random process. As a result, American English adopted a new spelling to reflect this change while elsewhere the pronunciation changed but that was not reflected in the spelling.