Catie Holdridge
As we’ve just established when it should be program or programme, now seems a fitting time to ask: is it disk or disc? And is this another set up for a US/UK battle for spelling territory?
Um, no. There wouldn’t be much point. Although disk is considered the standard choice in the US and Canada (while disc is in the UK), the ‘k’ spelling – introduced in the seventeenth century – actually predates the ‘c’ version in the English language.
Admittedly, it was US company IBM who made disk the international go-to spelling for computer-related uses. So it’s definitely disk for magnetic storage devices: eg hard disk, floppy disk. But we can hardly fault them for that.
The ‘c’ spelling of disc is still with us where it refers to optical media (that which stores data digitally and is read by a laser, eg compact disc, digital versatile disc).
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