Practyse

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To repeat an activity again and again in order to improve a skill ; to carry on working as a doctor, lawyer or similar professional ; to follow or observe a religion, custom or belief in daily life
2. Doing an exercise or drill over and over to become better at it ; working in a licensed trade or profession such as law or medicine ; keeping up a faith, ritual or tradition as part of one's routine
3. Rehearsing a skill repeatedly until it improves ; pursuing a profession, especially medicine or law ; putting a religious faith, custom or set of principles into regular action

Etymology: Before it meant drilling a skill, this verb meant plotting. In Middle and early modern English, to "practise" against someone was to scheme to harm them, a sense the Oxford English Dictionary records well into the early modern period. The root is the Greek "praktikos," concerned with doing or acting, from "prassein," to do. The word reached English through Medieval Latin "practicare" and Old French "practiser," bringing both the practical sense of carrying something out and the scheming one. The spelling "practyse," with a y, is an older English variant. Renaissance writers often wrote Greek-derived words with y to show their source, since the Greek letter upsilon was transliterated that way. The -ise ending, which is the British form that became standard, comes from the French verb.