The many failures of the 'I before E except after C' rule

The one general language rule that most people remember from school is not a very good rule at all

Science
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English spelling is hard. It's hard for kids to learn it, and it's hard for adults who have already learned it to remember how to do it right. It would be nice to have some consistent, general rules to go by, but alas, there are few. Maybe none. Even the one general rule that most people remember from school is not a very good rule at all: I before E except after C — but not in "eight," or "protein," or "efficient," or "glacier," or "Einstein," or, or, or…

There are violations of this rule everywhere you turn. The Wikipedia article on the rule even lists out words that violate both parts of the rule simultaneously: cheiromancies, cleidomancies, eigenfrequencies, obeisancies, oneiromancies. Of course, those are not words we use very often, and a rule of thumb shouldn't be obliged to deal with them. But the rule also fails for a number of very common words, such as "their," "height," and "science." In fact, when Mark Liberman at Language Log ran the numbers on a large sample of newspaper text to see how well the rule accounted for the facts, he found that the rule "I before E no matter what" actually did a slightly better job, even though that rule is obviously not true.

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Arika Okrent

Arika Okrent is editor-at-large at TheWeek.com and a frequent contributor to Mental Floss. She is the author of In the Land of Invented Languages, a history of the attempt to build a better language. She holds a doctorate in linguistics and a first-level certification in Klingon. Follow her on Twitter.