arnie said, "This looks like another finger-in-dyke-type of attempt to hold back the flood of English loan words." I'd have said dike (and would have thought dyke was wrong) but, knowing arnie, I had no doubt that his spelling was perfectly proper. And so it is. Indeed, at first dyke-with-a-y seems far more prevalant in google, but this may be because it often appears as a surname.

Is this a regional mattter?

Does the prevalence of one spelling over the other depend on whether the word is used to mean a water-barrier, or to mean a certain sexual orientation?

The spelling 'dyke' just looks a bit more normal for all senses. Certainly I would only use 'dyke' in the sense 'lesbian'; and the fact that dikes (whether ditches or earthworks, a curious duality of meaning in itself) tend to be more associated with Holland than with old England gives support to the Y spelling: dyke as in dijk.

Then I look at Offa's Dike and Offa's Dyke and wonder... nope, nope, I don't wonder now that I've typed them. Offa's Dyke looks far more familiar.

I've certainly seen "dike" used but assumed it was one of those strange American variants like "color".

On looking it up it doesn't seem just confined to just the left side of the pond, but is available to us British, too. Oddly, the Online Etymolygy Dictionary gives only the "lesbian" meaning for "dyke".

quote:

dyke-with-a-y seems far more prevalant in google, but this may be because it often appears as a surname.

I suspect it is more likely that the "lesbian" meaning appears more often.