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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 1866857" data-attributes="member: 6929">On the 'die-dice' thing, here's my (unfounded) theory:Blame the dictionary makers. Until a few centuries ago, spelling was by no means standardised. When you made an english word plural, you ended it sibilantly. The word 'die', a polyhedron featuring numerically-labelled sides, could be pluralised as dies, dise, dice, or anything else that looked right.When someone got the clever idea of making a book of words, a diction-ary, they didn't quite get this standardisation thing. 99.9% of words got standardised. But for some reason, whether laziness or just worrying about confusion with the verb 'to die', the plural of die (n.) became dice, not dies.The pronunciation is the same, more or less; 'dice' seems to be more sibilant these days, although I suspect that's its dissociation from 'dies' in spelling causing a dissociation in pronunciation.Someone should start a petition to correct the spelling to a standard form...PS: I can type grammatically. I find it much harder not to do so. Perhaps this comes from reading rather than watching TV in my youth (not so long ago, really), and thus I am devoid of hope for the future of the language, when most reading comes from TXTmsgs and the Internet...</blockquote>