pirate or pyrate?

[Shipwreck John]

Just Curious. This came up in another forum and I was wondering myself...Is there a historical significance?

[Abrams]

I've always considered "pyrate" to be a spelling to give a more archaic feel. A similar thing with vampire and vampyr...

I dunno, they're the same troublemakers to me!

[Caraccioli]

I had always thought it was just an interesting way for the site owners to differentiate the site. I figured they were using the spelling from the title of Captain Johnson's book A General History of the Pyrates. (Which is also mistakenly attributed to Daniel Defoe. Oh, what a tangled web...)

Spellings are often quite varied in documents from the GaOP, probably due to the fact that the first widely distributed dictionary was written by Webster in 1783. And that was written for a school, so I don't imagine it gained popular circulation until years, possibly decades after that. Without a source like that being available and with education being quite spotty during that time, it would make sense that one spelled words in whatever way made the most sense to them during the GaOP. (Well, that's my guess, anyhow.)

As for pirate, one source gives the etymology thusly:

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin pirata, from Greek peirates, from peiran, to attempt, from peira, trial; see per-3 in Indo-European roots.] (From http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/p/p0327300.html )

[Note: corrected a favorite error of mine thanks to a note from wages. I seem to have this mysterious Captain Adams wandering around in my head who wrote the General History. Anyone know why that is?)

[Captain Midnight]

I would think "pyrate" is just an archaic way of spelling "pirate". No difference in the definitions of the terms.

[The Doctor]

An archaic writing convention was to use a "y" in place of the phonetic long "i".

[John_Young]

So are there Vampyr Pyrates that practice Magick? Heh.

I always thought it was just a great way to spell it.

Now there is a difference between Crew/Crewe and Krewe...