English

Verb

supercede ‎(third-person singular simple present supercedes, present participle superceding, simple past and past participle superceded)

1. Misspelling of supersede.
   • 1491, Acta Dom. Conc.:

     He sall supercede þe payment of þe said v^c frankis.

   • 1857, The American Law Register — On the Doctrine of Uses as an Element of our Law of Conveyances, Vol. 6, № 2/3:

     To it a new species of conveyancing owes its origin, which dispenses with livery of seisin, and almost entirely supercedes, in practice, the employment of common law deeds.

   • 2000, Juliet Floyd & Hilary Putnam, The Journal of Philosophy — A Note on Wittgenstein’s “Notorious Paragraph” about the Godel Theorem, Vol. 97, № 11:

     They saw themselves as providing a freestanding “ideal language” or “concept-language,” what W. V. Quine has called a first-grade conceptual scheme, which in some sense supercedes ordinary language.

   • 2002, Amy Kapczynski, The Yale Law Journal — Queer Brinksmanship: Citizenship and the Solomon Wars, Vol. 112, № 3:

     The DoD may contend that the consolidated Solomon Amendment, passed in 1999, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000 § 549, supercedes the regulations.

Usage notes

• The form supercede is commonly considered a misspelling of supersede, since it results from confusion between Latin cedere ‎(“give up, yield”) and sedere ‎(“to sit”).^[1] The original Latin word was supersedere ‎(“to sit above”), but the ‘c’ spelling began to be used in Middle French, appeared in English as early as the 1400s, and is still sometimes found. The fact that 'supersede' is the only English word ending in sede, while several end in cede, also encourages confusion.
• Most dictionaries do not include this spelling; a few list it as a variant, sometimes identified as a misspelling.^[2] A search of general dictionaries at Onelook All Dictionaries finds 4 instances of "supercede" excluding this one (with one flagged as misspelling), and 24 of "supersede".

References

1. ↑ “supercede” in Paul Brians, Common Errors in English.
2. ↑ “supercede” in the Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary.