I before E except after C

For other uses, see I before E except after C (disambiguation).
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

"I before E, except after C" is a mnemonic rule of thumb for English spelling. If one is unsure whether a word is spelled with the digraph ⟨ei⟩ or ⟨ie⟩, the rhyme suggests that the correct order is ⟨ie⟩ unless the preceding letter is ⟨c⟩, in which case it may be ⟨ei⟩.

The rhyme is very well known; Edward Carney calls it "this supreme, and for many people solitary, spelling rule".[1] However, the short form quoted above has many common exceptions; for example:

  • ⟨ie⟩ after ⟨c⟩: species, science, sufficient, society
  • ⟨ei⟩ not preceded by ⟨c⟩: seize, vein, weird, heist, their, feisty, foreign, protein

The proportion of exceptions can be reduced by restricting application of the rule based on the sound represented by the spelling. Two common restrictions are:

  • excluding cases where the spelling represents the "long a"[n 1] sound (the lexical sets of FACE /eɪ/ and perhaps SQUARE /ɛər/). This is commonly expressed by continuing the rhyme "or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh".
  • including only cases where the spelling represents the "long e"[n 1] sound (the lexical sets of FLEECE /iː/ and perhaps NEAR /ɪər/ and happY /i/).

Variant pronunciations of some words (such as heinous and neither) complicate application of sound-based restrictions, which do not eliminate all exceptions. Many authorities deprecate the rule as having too many exceptions to be worth learning.[2][3][4][5]

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  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference wheat32 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference liberman2006 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference dfore2009 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).


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