“Synced” or “synched”

Question

Which is correct: synced or synched? Is one of these American and the other British spelling or are they interchangeable?

I have only ever seen sync used in the computing industry.

Answer 1

The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 30 incidences of synced and 14 of synched. Over half of the incidences of synced are from the magazine PC World, though. Synced does appear to be most commonly used in computing contexts.

Answer 2

synch is a variant of sync, and sync (synced) is the one mostly used.

Both are the informal short form of synchronization.

Answer 3

Both are questionable abbreviations of "synchronized".

If one insists on the "sync" neologism, then "synced" looks more reasonable to me.

Answer 4

The OED records the word as a noun and gives both spellings.

Answer 5

American English:

British English:

Synced is more popular than synched for both American and British English, but the gap is closer in British English.

I've seen both used in the computer industry. The common and my preferred way of abbreviating synchronous is sync, rather than synch, partly because it makes more sense to pronounce it as sink than sinch and the shorter abbreviation is simpler and clearer. Also to avoid any confusion with the slang word cinch (pronounced sinch).

For similar reasons and consistency, I'd recommend synced over synched and async over asynch.

You'll also save ink and disk space.

Answer 6

I have several computer-savvy friends, and they use the word a lot. I have only ever seen synced.

Looking at the Ngram of "synced" vs. "synched", I see that since the widespread use of computers, "synched" is becoming more popular. However, the spellchecker on this site does not recognize "synched", and Dictionary.com does not help with the past tense form of "sync". So make of that what you will.

Answer 7

In the Roman Alphabet, the voiceless velar fricative is represented by the ch digraph. However, most words containing a voiceless velar fricative in borrowee language have the voiceless velar fricative coverted into a voiceless velar plosive, due to English-speakers' traditional inability to voice the appropriate pronunciation.

Thus, in the english language,because the H in Synchronise no longer serves a purpose at all (the ch digraph being converted into a sound that can be represented solely by C), Sync would be more correct that Synch would if you're following the rules established in the English language.

http://languagelover.blogspot.com/2009/09/sync-or-synch.html

Answer 8

"Synced" is a little confusing for the reader since it could be pronounced like "since", thus the "synched" spelling is probably to make it more readable.

Answer 9

I'm a longtime American IT executive, not a linguist, but I see both variations in IT:

• "sync" is very common, e.g., in the name of the widespread utility "rsync" (of Australian origin); "synch" is less common but still frequently seen
• "synched" is more common than "synced"
• "synching" is uncommon; "syncing" is uncommon, too, especially recently

Answer 10

The grammar rule which has applied to words ending with the letter C states the addition of the K, as in picnicked, shellacked, tarmacked, mimicked, zincked, etc. While we're talking about the abbreviations of synchronize which allow sync or synch, the version we choose determines what is proper. Ultimately, this is a decision between synched (which I would discourage, but that's just my opinion) or syncked, never synced.