You likely remember the spelling rule, “I before E, except after C.”
It’s been taught in English grammar textbooks at least as far back as 1866 and persists in modern school texts. In fact, it’s been called the “supreme, and for many people solitary, spelling rule.” The rule is supposed to help with the complexity of English.
Only, like many rules, it’s not very useful.
For starters, the version most of us remember is incomplete. The full rule is “I before E, except after C or when sounded as A, as in neighbor and weigh.” This expanded rule is much harder to remember and still not complete. The words science, forfeit, seize – and dozens of others – are exceptions.
The Merriam Webster dictionary amusingly tried to account for the myriad of exceptions with this whopper of a rule:
I before e, except after c
Or when sounded as ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’
Unless the ‘c’ is part of a ‘sh’ sound as in ‘glacier’
Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like ‘fancier’
And also except when the vowels are sounded as ‘e’ as in ‘seize’
Or ‘i’ as in ‘height’
Or also in ‘-ing’ inflections ending in ‘-e’ as in ‘cueing’
Or in compound words as in ‘albeit’
Or occasionally in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as in ‘cuneiform’
Or in other random exceptions such as ‘science’, ‘forfeit’, and ‘weird’.
It gets worse funnier.
A statistician named Nathan Cunningham tested the original I Before E rule on 350,000 English words. As expected by the first part of the rule, “ie” was about three times more prevalent than “ei.” However, despite the second part of the rule, “cie” words outnumber “cei” ones by about three to one. On average, I before E is just as common after C as it is after any other letter.
In fact, Cunningham showed a better rule would be I before E, except after W.
English is weird.
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