Singular of "dice"

I have never heard of "dice" being used as a singular instead of die. As a collective noun which could include one, sure:

Go on and roll the dice. How many dice do I roll? Just one.

But as a straight, unambiguous singular?

Roll one dice

or even worse

Roll a dice

sounds off to me. So I went to check published usage to see if I was being overly pedantic.

I ran a Google books search for the phrases "roll one die" and "roll one dice." I got:

• 5,540 results for "roll one die"
• 139 results for "roll one dice"

Browsing through the first page of results, a lot of the hits on "roll one dice" seem to be either self-published books or false positives for phrases like "roll one's dice" or "re-roll one dice roll," neither of which support Oxford's rule.

Running an Ngram...the Ngram viewer had no trouble with "roll one die" but could not find "roll one dice" at all.

Add to this the fact that "die" is commonly used in idioms like "The die is cast"--this doesn't guarantee that it's current and understood (see "short shrift") but it is another piece of evidence on the pile.

Based on this--and my experience--I would respectfully disagree that "roll one die" is archaic or obsolete in modern English. Even if "roll one dice" is gaining ground as an alternate form, "roll one die" is still the preferred singular, at least in formal writing.

In my experience, "die" is the singular of dice. Dictionary.com has my back on this one.

"One die" sounds better to me than "one dice."

Both forms are currently widely used. Singular die remains more frequent overall, but singular dice is also reasonably common, even in formal writing, and especially in British English.

A google ngrams graph for throw a die vs. throw a dice shows that die has remained consistently more frequent, but that the difference has been generally shrinking over time. In recent decades, throw a die wins by a factor of about 1.5--2. Comparing roll a die/dice gives a larger difference, a factor of about 7--10.

Restricting to UK usage, however, the story changes. In roll a die/dice, die is still the winner, but by a much smaller margin; and with throw a die/dice, they have been close to equally popular for a while, with dice more common since 1990 but die regaining ground recently.

(I speculate that the reason for the throw/roll difference is that throw is mostly used casually, while roll is preferred by serious gamers.)

Even if it is legal, I would only use "dice" in a plural sense, because either the plural sense definition appears before the singular definition, or most of the examples for "dice" are plural, and because of the fact that "die" is specifically listed as the singular of "dice":

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dice

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dice

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/dice

The problem is that according to the Oxford dictionary, "dice" can be interpreted either as singular or plural, making the definition ambiguous. If the reader knows the sentences are written in Modern Standard English, using the word "one" before "dice" could resolve the problem. How would the reader know the sentences are Modern Standard English and were not written before the time when this became a standard, or know that the sentences didn't contain older references?

In this sentence, dice is not ambiguous because of the word "one":

"We lost one dice whilst playing the game yesterday."

However, in the following sentence:

"We lost dice whilst playing the game yesterday."

This sentence could be also interpreted to mean that "we lost one (pair of) dice", E.G. that you actually lost 2 dice.

Even though this usage is valid according to the dictionary, without the use of the word "one", anyone who has seen the word "die" used as the singular or found a dictionary entry listing "die" as the singular will have to guess as to whether "dice" is being used in the singular or plural sense.

"The 3D artist was developing a dice model, to be printed later."

The word "a" before "dice model" suggests that there is only one actual model to be printed, but it's not clear whether a dice model refers to one model of only one die, or to one model of multiple dice.

Could either of these sentences be used?

"The 3D artist was developing a model of only one die, to be printed later."

"The 3D artist was developing a model of (two, three) dice, to be printed later."