indice

[Herb Stahlke]

Jacques Berlinerblau, in his On Faith column on today's Washington
Post web site, writes, "Yet as an indice of some of the lines of
attack that the McCain camp is employing it is of great interest."
The OED lists "indice" as "obs. rare." and cites two mid-17th c.
examples with the meaning "an indication, sign, token." Most Google
hits are either on French/Spanish/Italian web sites or are
trade-names.  BNet Resources
(http://resources.bnet.com/topic/indice.html) uses "indice" as an
entry word, but most instances are plural.  Grant Barrett and Martha
Barnett discuss the word on "A Way with Words" and find that it's used
mostly in finance.  One emailer on their site writes, "The discussion
on index and indece [sic] was interesting. It surprised me when the
indice term was indicated as not being real, (my unabridged dictionary
agreed on it not being real, durn it) I have commonly used index as a
fixed number or the result of a study, and indice as the immeadiate or
approximate value, which when recorded would become an index. Index
had more impact than indice. I will probably continue using the two
terms, but, hopefully will only use "index" in reports or
presentations."  He says that he thinks he picked the term up thirty
years ago when he was working with some French engineers.

Herb

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