Persue (error)
From Hull AWE
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.)