.
Perhaps one reason that the spelling of the words advice and advise has not merged into just one spelling in AmE is that we also pronounce those two words differently.
On the other hand, practice and practise are pronounced identically in BE, aren’t they? 
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Hi,
Absobloominglutely.
Alan
Actually, practice is a verb… practise is a noun. It is not American vs British English, so the debate is based upon a false starting point. Sorry!
Zookie, you got it wrong. In British English ‘practise’ is the verb and ‘practice’ is the noun. As for the debate, how much of it have you read and/or understood?[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC short conversations: Clarifying directions[YSaerTTEW443543]
My apologies - I am working on less than three hours sleep and typed the words the wrong way around. You are correct of course - in British, ‘practise’ is the verb and ‘practice’ is the noun.
I read and understood the entire discussion.
I am British and was taught the clear distinction. It mars the precision to spell both words in the same way.
Spelling is very precise (unlike me this morning on so little sleep!) and I was taught the same distinction for license/licence as well.
Actually, Joy Fielding is Canadian, so I would expect her to use the practice/practise, licence/license noun-verb distinction.
Savvythought also wrote:
“Isn’t this how the US emerged and developed into the strongest nation - just taking the best of everything and re-arrange it?”
Attributing success to all sorts of things is a pet peeve of mine. It’s about as accurate as saying that the Wehrmacht was so successful at Blitzkrieg because Hitler was a vegetarian. There are all sorts of unsentimental reasons for America’s success in the past hundred years and cultural borrowing is not one of them. (Industrial espionage did play a small part in its copying of the industrial revolution, but not that much.) The frequently cited reasons are political stability (Enlightenment philosophy), natural resources ripe for easy military conquest, geographical isolation, and later capital and business.
Hello everyone
Brief introduction: I’m an architect, working in a multi-national firm in the Middle East. We are occasionally engaged here largely on the basis of our British background, and we operate in an English laguage business sphere; on both counts we feel obliged to make sure our English is as ‘correct’ as possible, and we DO recognise the difference between American and British English.
Why ‘correct’, instead of correct? Because I believe that English is permanently in a state of development, and that there are actually very few rules; rather, simple conventions for use. However, American English is equally ready to develop, and in many cases has chosen a quite different route to its forebear. On occasion such differences are signficant; take momentarily as in ‘shortly’ (American) and ‘briefly’ (British), for example. Accordingly we recognise and discriminate on the basis of the difference.
Once you get out into the real world, though, the differences are interesting, occasionally amusing, and should be embraced. I’m intrigued by the general conviction that the two versions will ultimately converge, however, and not sure that I agree. In my lifetime they have consistently DIverged, and the various forms of British English - Cockney, Scots, Doric, Lancashire, Yorkshire, for example, among many more - show no sign of converging after a thousand years or so… Let’s hope they don’t, and that British and American English keep diverging too. Vive la difference, as they say somehere in Europe.
Cheers, Will