I just discovered the verb relic, meaning “to make something look worn” and used as far as I can tell only about guitars. (Examples: 1 2 3 …) I was surprised to see that its participles are pretty consistently spelled relicing and reliced, not *relicking and *relicked like other verbs ending in -ic (mimic → mimicking, traffic → trafficking, etc.). No matter what general rules might tell us, for this particular verb, it is clear that putting hair pests back onto a guitar is a thing (hundreds of independent hits) whereas applying one's tongue again isn't (only 7 hits, all of them using relicing as well).
Are relicing and reliced consistently pronounced re-lick-ing/'d as the formation would suggest and not re-lice-ing/'d as the spelling would suggest?
How did this spelling come about? Did the verb forms spring from a specific source or did they evolve “naturally”?
Are there other recent verb formations (I believe the verbing of relic dates from the electric guitar era) that are spelled this way, or is this an isolated case?
Best Answer
I don't know the explanation for your finding that relicing is used much more than relicking, so here is a partial answer to your other question:
The use of <cing> pronounced /kıŋ/ in "relicing" is not a completely isolated case.
arcing. This spelling pattern also shows up in the word "arcing", the -ing-form of the verb arc. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that arc has been used as a verb at least since 1893.
syncing. As noted in the answers to the related question "Synced" or "synched", the verb sync also has <ced> and <cing> spellings. It has a variant spelling synch.
talcing. The only spelling given by Oxford Dictionaries. Collins lists talcking and talcked alongside talcing and talced, but the -ck- forms for this verb are uncommon enough to not show up on the Google NGram Viewer, and Garner's Modern English Usage specifically says "talc [...] anomalously makes talced and talcing, not *talcked and *talcking." The OED's first citation for the verb talc is from 1888, and provides an example of the -ced spelling: "Engineer LXVI. 334 A glass plate is first cleaned, talced, and collodionized."