Regional spelling?
It's always been a homophone here. I do like different spellings in same sounds because it makes reading a lot quicker (I can just recognise word shape in the stupid way in which I read and don't get slowed down having to check context).
I think y making vowel sounds is why it's "sometimes" a vowel ^_^;
We also spell recognize with a Z, but that one I was aware of 😆
Yup, I mean we have the words eye and rye and fly, so why (lol) change it to an I in tire I wonder... probably only the US, just like our distance and temp measurements ha.
One of them is a centuries long spelling mistake? XD (I had a super quick look online and there's constant disagreements to which one is closer to the original spelling as it was apparently originally either "attire" or "attyre" and I didn't look any further than that, most of the entirety of English drifted).