Thanks. Always learn something from TGR.
Discrete is used a handful of times in the 14th century, then drops out of common use until the 16th century. Discreet, meanwhile, takes off, drawing on the "discerning" sense of its Latin root. But in the 14th and 15th centuries, spelling wasn't fixed, which meant that the word we know of as discreet was spelled as both discreet and discrete. When the modern discrete came back into style in the 16th century, the spellings of the words diverged: discrete and discreet became fixed as separate words, and their meanings remain separate, despite the confusion between them.
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