Happy Wednesday, word nerds! If you read last week’s word nerd post, you’ll know we’ve shifted temporarily into spelling-nerd mode so we can discuss that well known spelling mnemonic “I before E except after C”—specifically, the suggestion that the rule is useless because there are 923 exceptions to it.
I pointed out last week that the full rhyme is actually “When the sound is /ee/, it’s I before E except after C,” so I could have ruled out almost the entire list straight up, but I thought it might be more fun to do it backward, so to speak, and see if we can’t work out why this rule came about in the first place.
Here’s the list as it looked at the end of last week’s post. I pointed out several instances last week where so-called “rule breakers” are actually following basic spelling conventions:
1. Forming the plural for words ending in “CY”
(eg. mercy → mercies)
2. Adding a suffix to a word ending in “E”
(eg. agree → agreeing)
3. Compound and hyphenated words
(eg. here+in = herein)
4. Adding a prefix to a word beginning with “I”
(eg. re+install = reinstall)
5. Words where “I” and “E” sound separately
(eg. atheist = ath•e•ist, science = sci•ence)
The reason we got all of these words out of the way last week is that, when we talk about the “I before E” rule, we really only want to look at words where ‘IE’ or ‘EI’ are working together as a vowel team—that is, representing a single vowel sound—within a root word. By root word, I mean a word in its most basic form, without suffixes or prefixes added. So the word happy, for example, is a root word, from which words like happiness, happier, happiest, happily, unhappy and so on can be created by adding prefixes or suffixes.
That being the case, the first words I’m scrubbing off that list of “rule-breakers” today are words that are variations on a root word (abseiling, abseiled, abseils, etc) or which form a new word based on a root word (eg. eighteen, eighteenth). After all, if you know how to spell weight, then you know how to spell all other words including the word weight, such as overweight, underweight, heavyweight, and so on.
I’m also going to take off words that are taken directly from another language (eg. eisteddfod), words that incorporate a foreign word (eg. eigenvalue and leitmotif), or words that are proper nouns taken from foreign places (eg. Seine, Einstein, Pompeii). I’m not sure it’s really fair to accuse foreign words of not following a rule of English spelling!
And we’ve now cut our list down to around fifty or sixty words.
Can you really defend the "I before E" rule?
Now, you may remember I mentioned the All About Spelling program last week. One of the things that makes this such a brilliant program is that it teaches spelling phonetically in a logical sequence. Much of what I’m about to share with you I have picked up from teaching my kids with this program.
All About Spelling Program
The letter combination ‘CI’
One of the phonograms you learn in the later stages of the All About Spelling program is the letter combination ‘CI’, which is used to make the /sh/ sound in words like special, social, precious, and so on. This letter combination is always followed by at least one other vowel, usually an ‘A’ or an ‘O’, but occasionally it is followed by an ‘E’, seeming to flout the “I before E” rule. But if you have learned that ‘CI’ makes the /sh/ sound, then you know that the ‘I’ and the ‘E’ aren’t functioning as a single unit, and there’s no question of which one should come first. And since there’s no /ee/ sound, there’s no need to consider this rule anyway.
There are only a handful of root words where ‘E’ follows ‘CI’: ancient, species, conscience, efficient, deficient, sufficient, proficient. In the US, you can also add omniscient, prescient, and nescient; however, British English pronounces the ‘I’ and ‘E’ as individual sounds (similar to in science, but with a short ‘I’ sound rather than a long ‘I’). Either way, we can cross these words off our list!
The Vowel Combination ‘EI’
This vowel combination usually makes one of two sounds. It can make the long ‘A’ sound /ay/ as in veil or the long ‘I’ sound /eye/ as in feisty. One of the reasons for this is that the combination ‘EI’ makes the long ‘A’ sound in French, and the long ‘I’ sound in German, although, depending on when the word came into the English language, it may or may not have retained that pronunciation (thanks to the Great Vowel Shift, among other things).
In a few words, namely counterfeit, forfeit, surfeit, sovereign, and foreign, the ‘EI’ falls on an unaccented syllable, which means the sound is more closed than it would otherwise be. However these are still technically classed as falling into the category of words where ‘EI’ says /ay/. (Compare reign to sovereign.)
This accounts for the majority of the words that remain on our list of so-called “rule-breakers”, which is now looking something like this:
Pretty colourful, isn’t it? For the record, here are the root words we still have left:
Caffeine
Codeine
Cysteine
Either
Heifer
Leisure
Meiosis
Neither
Protein
Seize
Weir
Weird
That’s assuming you pronounce either, neither, and leisure with a long /ee/ sound (which I don’t. I pronounce either and neither with a long /eye/ sound, and leisure with a short /ε/ sound like in bed.)
You’ll note that quite a few of these words are chemical/medical words: caffeine, codeine, cysteine, meiosis, and protein. Words related to the sciences draw heavily on Greek, which uses the ‘EI’ combination, and caffeine is taken directly from the French.
Green = words that actually follow the rule
Red = words ruled out last week
Black = words that aren’t roots
Blue = foreign words
Yellow = ‘CI’ words
Purple = ‘EI’ says /ay/ or /eye/
That brings us to the remaining words: heifer, seize, weir, and weird. And heifer doesn’t technically fall under the rule since it has the short /ε/ sound. I haven’t been able to discover an explanation for why these words are spelled the way they are. Perhaps they were pronounced slightly differently when their spelling was determined, or perhaps there’s another explanation altogether. In any case, you can see there are actually very few exceptions to the “I before E” rule if you remember the complete rule: When the sound is /ee/, it’s I before E except after C.
And the more I think about it, the more I think the full “I before E” rule makes sense. There really are many more words where the combination is ‘EI’, so if you’re wanting to remember that the exception to this ordering is when the sound is /ee/ (unless preceded by the letter ‘C’), you really couldn’t come up with a better mnemonic. Which is possibly exactly why it came about in the first place.
But before I go, for those of you who would still like a catchy little sentence to remind you of the REAL exceptions to this rule, how’s this?
When the sound is /ee/, it’s I before E except after C*
*unless you seize a weird guy selling caffeine and protein on a weir.
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