The divergence in spelling is due in part to the way in which the words originated. Disk came into the English language in the mid-17th century, and was modelled on words such as whisk; disc arose some time later, and was based on the original Latin root discus. 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. 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 European 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.
Whatever their heritage, in computer jargon today it is common for the k-spelling to refer mainly to magnetic storage devices, while the c-spelling is customary for optical media such as the compact disc and similar technologies. Even in the computing field, however, the terms are used inconsistently; software documentation often uses the k-spelling exclusively.
Etymology: from Greek δίσκος, a flat round object athletes competed in throwing. See discus throw.
In astrophysics, an accretion disc or disk is a structure formed by material falling into a gravitational source.
Disc came into the English language in the mid-17th century, from the Latin discus, and like already-existing words like whisc or risc, it was spelled with c; disk arose some time later, and was based on the original Greek root diskus.
By the early 1990s digital media such as the compact disc surpassed the analogue disc in popularity, but analogue discs continue to be made (although in very limited quantities) into the 21st century.
Recording on disc as opposed to phonograph cylinder had been contemplated and experimented with by such inventors as Charles Cros, Thomas Edison, Chichester Bell, but the first to actually develop usable disc record technology was Emil Berliner, a German working in Washington, D.C, in 1884.
The first disc recordings for phonographs or gramophones were commercially marketed in 1895, and they gradually overtook the earlier phonograph cylinder as the dominant medium of recorded sound by the 1910s.
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