3 ms·

Looks like it switched in the 1970s https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rite+of+passage%2C+right+of+passage&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&s

• gregschlom 10y ago
  I'm no language expert, but I don't think there was any "switch". As Wikipedia says, "[rite of passage] is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage." "Right of passage" may mean something similar to "right of way", and may be used my mistake when people mean "rite of passage" but there was never a switch in how "rite" is spelled.
• dragonwriter 10y ago
  No, it didn't switch. "Right of passage" is a thing, but it's a completely different thing from "rite of passage". Compare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_passage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_passage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage