Artefact is the British spelling for an object made by a person, especially one of historical or cultural interest, such as a museum piece. Artifact is the American spelling of the same word, and it has also spread into science and computing for a stray distortion or a build output.
The core difference
The two spellings share one meaning, but artifact has taken on extra technical senses that artefact rarely carries.
- artefact — an object made by a person, especially of historical interest, British spelling: The museum displayed Bronze Age artefacts found near the river.
- artifact — the same meaning, American spelling: The dig produced hundreds of artifacts, mostly pottery fragments and bone needles.
- artifact — also a false feature in an image or recording, or a build output in software: The pipeline uploads the compiled artifact to the registry after every successful build.
How to tell them apart
Both come from the Latin phrase arte factum, "made by skill", from ars ("art, skill") and facere ("to make"). British English kept the older French-influenced spelling, while American English simplified it to artifact.
The mix-up is easy to miss in technical writing: even British writers often keep "artifact" for the imaging-distortion or software-build sense, since that usage grew up in American-led fields like computing and medical imaging, while reserving "artefact" for historical objects.
