This bothered grammarians, so they tried to create rules to make English tidier and easier to learn. I before e is one of those rules. Unfortunately, it was created after most of the 'ie' words were.
Smart people tried to adapt the rule to actually follow English spelling. That's where we got this variant:. Nice try, but it's still full of exceptions. To make the above jingle accurate, it'd need to be something like:.
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 numerous and random exceptions such as 'science', 'forfeit', and 'weird'.
And that doesn't even rhyme. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. This is true in many categories of words, including the following ten groups:. Ultimately, it may be wise to forget that such a rule exists and always check spelling of words that may have an ie or an ei combination. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily!
A couple of East European friends of mine always take a dig at the English language for having a single letter pronounced differently based on the situation. Heifer is pronounced with a short E too! Frankly the whole thing is a bit of a waste of time. The I before E saying seems to work well enough, but maybe it is because I just have the exceptions memorized?
More interesting to me in this article is the rendering of some of the pronunciations. Or… with a short e, as in hefty. The various correct pronunciations add such richness and color to the language! For general usage, the limerick that many of us were taught as little people has always served me well. For those seldom used words is why we have dictionaries.
I think most of the rest of the English-speaking world use a short e. I agree strongly with Cyngifier: More interesting to me in this article is the rendering of some of the pronunciations. To-may-to, to-mah-to. The closing paragraph made me laugh. As adults, we have choices of memorizing the less-used words or looking them up. For people with adult vocabularies, the rule is probably kind of useless.
Something being dialectical does not exempt it from the standards of Standard, but precisely the opposite. The short E is British, not American. Americans can and some do use the short E. That is either dialectical or simply affected.
That would spare us miseries like speSSies. Those preceding As, Os, Us, and consonants are as Ks. Or using A or AN depends on whether the following word begins with a vowel sound, not necessarily a vowel letter.
In Canadian English, leisure and measure are rhymes, both pronounced with a short E. Here, I have never heard the pronunciation may-zhure that one hears in some of the U.
We have included a list of some of these words below. It is important that you do not rely on this rule completely, as there are exceptions and words that can trick you. We recommend that you memorize our list of exceptions, and keep them in mind when you are writing. If you are unsure of yourself when it comes to the spelling of these words, let eContent Pro help. Learn more about our copy editing and proofreading services, and submit your document today.
Blog Mailing List Log In. Words commonly mistaken as exceptions but are spelled correctly There are many words that are commonly thought of as being exceptions, but are in fact spelled correctly.
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