License and licence are both English terms.
License is predominantly used in 🇺🇸 American (US) English (en-US
) while licence is predominantly used in 🇬🇧 British English (used in UK/AU/NZ) (en-GB
).
In terms of actual appearance and usage, here's a breakdown by country, with usage level out of 100 (if available) 👇:
Term | US | UK | India | Philippines | Canada | Australia | Liberia | Ireland | New Zealand | Jamaica | Trinidad & Tobago | Guyana |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
license | 97 | 34 | 48 | 95 | 82 | 43 | 100 | 28 | 53 | 82 | 86 | 80 |
licence | 3 | 66 | 52 | 5 | 18 | 57 | 0 | 72 | 47 | 18 | 14 | 20 |
Below, we provide some examples of when to use license or licence with sample sentences.
(Examples are Wikipedia snippets under the CC ShareAlike 3.0 license.)