DPhil pronounced as D fill?

If I'm reading it right, around here (usa) we would pronounce the letters P H D, and not try to pronounce the degree as an acronym. Since this is British, your guess is as good as mine.

Thank you Roger.

Well, we need Contrex and McTag to be here.

It means "Doctorate in Philosophy". If I were reading this out loud, I would say the full title or use PHD as mentioned earlier.

It's short for Doctor of philosophy. You can say PHD or just shorten it to 'Dee Fill.'

One difference I've noticed between American and British vernacular is that Americans tend to use initials a lot whereas we tend to shorten things. Television is a good example. Americans say TV we say telly. Video Cassette Recorder, Americans say VCR we say video.

Some universities offer a DPhil, and some a PhD.

I think there is a subtle difference but apart from one being in Latin, I'm not sure what the difference is.

Cool.

Thank you.
Thank you all.

In the nineteenth-century, the DPhil was a higher doctorate similar to the DLitt at the ancient Scottish universities, which at that time adhered to the continental rather than the English university model.

Around World War I, universities in Britain decided to introduce the concept of the PhD in response to the fact that they were losing students to European and US universities who wished to do a PhD there. Those students were allowed to go direct from graduation with their bachelors' degree to registration for PhD at their new institution, whereas if they had stayed in Britain and sought to supplicate for DLitt or DPhil they would usually have had to wait until they were 30 until they were eligible, and then have faced a tougher examination. You could usually only be a candidate for a higher degree at the institution where you had graduated with your first degree, except for a transference arrangement (still pertaining) between Oxford, Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin.

The PhD was regarded with deep suspicion by many British universities and was deliberately *not* accorded the status of the higher doctorates. At Cambridge, for example, all doctors get to wear a scarlet festal gown *except* the PhD, who gets a plain black gown with scarlet facings attached with safety pins. Nor do PhDs achieve the precedence of other doctors within the university.

Edinburgh preserved the DPhil and PhD alongside each other for a few years.

Now it makes absolutely no difference in Britain what the degree is called; the old-style DPhil no longer exists. At a minority of universities, the nomenclature DPhil has been adopted for the PhD (Oxford, York, Sussex etc.) but there is no difference of any kind between the requirements for these degrees and for PhD (thus making this distinction potentially somewhat misleading, particularly in view of the former difference in status between DPhil and PhD).

Thanks for some interesting information.

Something I have noticed is that when Americans use a designation (e.g. for government forms) with letters and a final number, they often (but not always) use a hyphen to separate the letters from the number. Example: Interstate Highway I-15, Form 4506-T Request for Transcript of Tax Return. "K-9" is often used in connection with dogs (police military etc) whereas British custom seems to run them together without any separation e.g Form TS301, BBC2, M62. I noticed that the British TV drama series "Spooks", about the activities of the government security agency MI5, was named "MI-5" for the US market. I believe the word "spook" is slightly dodgy in the US, since it can not only mean "ghost" or by extension "secret agent" but is also a racist term for black people.