Yep, it’s not becoming acceptable. It’s what known as “wrong.”
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Hmm… learn something new everyday!
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This thread reminds me of a scene from Orange Is The New Black when Big Boo and Lorna were playing Scrabble…
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Payed is not acceptable now, but it is becoming more common, especially online.Will it enter general usage, as dreamed has largely replaced dreamt, and knitted is replacing knit?
Generally, the regular form replaces the irregular, especially in AmE- but not always. The original past tense of dive was dived, but it was largely replaced by dove in AmE, by analogy to ride/rode and drive/drove.
Compare pay with play/played, pray/prayed, stay/stayed.
Where? Besides this thread, I mean…
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Yeah, any examples?
Can I jump on this thread with fishers.
I really hate that word, it sounds so unnatural. Fisherman won’t work as I’m teaching about women too.
What do you guys use?
The fishers of Taiwan, for example. It sounds so wrong
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It’s a word going back to Old English. It only sounds wrong because you’re used to “fisherman”.
Just use fisher.
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Didn’t note them at the time, and any attempt to find them gets swamped by grammar sites saying it is wrong. I have definitely come across it though, and there is at least one NYT article that uses it in passing.
Haven’t noticed it!
Maybe you dreamed it. Oops…dreamt it.
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Well anyway, it’s nothing to get hanged up about…
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So you get an idea of what the bulk of forumosa’ posters do for a living 
grammar nazi’ism(?) Is a fun thing to bate people with here.
People on the net need to just accept its a fun place to discuss things, nothing posted is a thesis for ph’s sakes.
As @the_bear suggests, just forget about it. Typos and grammar arent normally the point of the message people are trying to have a conversation about.
This isn’t nitpicking points of grammar though. This is a guy adamantly claiming (even advocating) that a misspelled word is gaining acceptance when there’s actual zero evidence for it.
Fair point. Burn the culrit then 
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I did a quick google search of “payed site:nytimes.com”. I’m mildly confused by the number of hits that don’t seem to actually include the word “payed”: maybe it’s buried in the comments somewhere. I only found one example clearly used in the actual text, in the archive from 1999: “President Yeltsin had just payed his respects at the coffin of King Hussein.” I’m going to call that a blunder, not a usage guide.
There are a few examples of rope or cable that was payed out (thanks to those upthread - that meaning wasn’t part of my active vocabulary, although I must have encountered it with all the Hornblower books I read as a kid), and others that seem to be faulty OCR (“the way was payed by leaders who came before us”).
Also did a search on economist.com - less useful, because it’s paywalled, but it seems like all the uses of payed are in the comments.
Nine results at newyorker.com. Certainly no increase in use over time - a 1953 one is mildly intriguing in that it makes me think, “Wait a minute, that one I have to think about”, with “payed a visit”.
Sixty-six results at theatlantic.com (vs 27,400 for paid). No sign of increasing use.
theguardian.com 834 results, but like with the NY Times, most of those articles don’t actually seem to include the word, so I’m guessing it’s buried in the comments. Two that I’d call errors, not valid examples: “She was payed less”, from 2015; “pledging to end the automatic affiliation fee payed by trade union members”, from 2013. And a third which is just complaining about how kids today don’t know how to spell.
Google Trends doesn’t show much sign of a change from 2004 to now. But I have never used that tool before today, so I may be doing it wrong.
Looks like it’s an occasional typo, rather than any kind of trend.
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Don’t you mean paiwalled? 
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First of all, someone can’t advocate that something is gaining acceptance. You can state or claim that it is, or advocate for it to do so.
Second, I commented on what I thought I had observed, and asked if anyone else had observed it. I suppose I should should have kept track of every incidence- I certainly will do so in the future.
If it is happening- and it might not be- it shouldn’t invoke gasps of repulsion. There have been many such changes in usage in the past, and there will be many more in the future.
Hopefully, the Internet will help us to track them more easily.
Yes, cheers for the grammar lesson. I did indeed forget to add “for” inside the parentheses when I wrote that reply. I should’ve payed better attention in English class, eh?
No one is gasping in revulsion, but you haven’t even pointed to one example where you observed this (except some vague mention of an uncited and possibly non-existent NYT article).