<p>Well, the olde English spelling is "daemon."</p>
<p>it looks really wEird. and it's old..so i guess no one uses it any more.</p>
<p>"it looks really wEird. and it's old..so i guess no one uses it any more"</p>
<p>googled it, and didn't notice you got 47 MILLION hits?</p>
<p>Daemon is a perfectly acceptable variant of demon.</p>
<p>okay okay</p>
<p>but I've never actually seen anyone write it that way.</p>
<p>Celloguy:</p>
<p>I don't actually think daemon is an acceptable variant of demon anymore. Demon always has a negative connotation. Demons are evil and wish us harm (except for a few on Buffy or Angel). Daemon or daimon get used a lot to identify a sort of minor supernatural creature in Greek mythology, which can be helpful and is not necessarily or usually a negative influence. Jiminy Cricket was a daimon. There are lots of similar things in Japanese culture, too, and in Roman mythology. And daemon has also been used in recent literature -- most famously, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials -- for a creature that is essentially an external projection of the human soul, or other such basically positive creatures.</p>
<p>Obviously, demon and daemon have the same root and were once the same word. But I don't think they are anymore.</p>
<p>Oh, really? I thought daemons only had to do with computers.</p>
<p>So is there a difference between a faerie and a fairy? A paediatrician and a pediatrician? ;)</p>
<p>A paedophile and pedophile?</p>
<p>Well, a paedopedophile has a children's foot fetish. ;)</p>
<p>(Sorry.)</p>
<p>all this stuff could go in the "everyday words hard to spell" thread in the high school life forum</p>