Persue (error)

The spelling persue is wrong.

The correct spelling of the verb is pursue, 

with the same first vowel as the related noun pursuit.

This is despite the fact that the three letters '-per-' are mostly pronounced, as the first syllable of pursue is, with IPA: /ɛ/, the vowel of 'bird', 'sir' and 'certain': for example, 'proper', 'perhaps', 'person', 'temperature', 'co-operative', 'paper' and 'pepper'.

OED does list one word spelled persue. It is an obsolete noun, last recorded in 1661, and used as a technical term in hunting: "A track of blood left by a wounded deer or other quarry in a hunt." Modern students are unlikely to use this word - or even come across it, except possibly Edmund Spenser's The Faery Queene, where he writes of a huntress:

She on a day, as she pursu'd the Chase

Of some wild Beast, which with her Arrows keen

She wounded had, the same along did trace

By track of Blood, which she had freshly seen,

To have besprinkled all the grassy Green;

By the great Persue which she there perceiv'd,

Well hopèd she the Beast engor'd had been,

And made more haste, the Life to have bereav'd:

But ah! her Expectation greatly was deceiv'd.

(Book III, canto v.)