Just when you think you have gotten a language straight in your mind, it goes and throws you a curve ball. This is exactly what happened to me a few weeks ago. Despite being a native English speaker and even having studied and taught the language, I am still learning things on a regular basis.

When I moved from America to the United Kingdom there was a completely different learning curve to the language to figure out. I’ll talk more about that in a future post but the slip-up I had a few weeks ago, did come down to a British – American difference.

Practise versus Practice

I have always found it a bit of a challenge to keep the difference between practise and practice clear in my mind. When I would write anything that needed one of these words, I would usually end up grabbing my language book to check that I was using the correct one. This became irritating enough that I decided to spend a few minutes actively memorizing the difference between the two words. Here’s what my language book had to say about the two:

Practice – Practice is a noun. For example:

“The doctor’s practice is open from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. every day.” –> Here practice basically means an office or a physical location where the doctor works.

“We need to put these ideas into practice.” –> Here practice means a habitual or customary action or way of doing something.

Practise on the other hand was slightly different.

Practise – Practise is a verb. For example:

“To learn English well you have to practise.”

“You must practise the violin everyday if you want to sound any good.”

I spent some time remembering the difference between the two and was feeling pretty good with myself (as you do when you learn something new!). And then I wrote a post for the Transparent Language English blog. I was using practise as a verb in the title so spelled it with an “s.” A few minutes after posting the post I got a quick note to say the editor had changed the spelling to a “c.”

We had a quick chat back and forth, I did some searching and as it turns out, in the States the word practice (with a c) is used as both a noun and verb.

The moral of the story? You can always learn something new about a language, even if you are a native speaker.