"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". 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, weigh, neighbor However, some of the words listed above do not contain the ⟨ie⟩ or ⟨ei⟩ digraph, but the letters ⟨i⟩ (or digraph ⟨ci⟩) and ⟨e⟩ pronounced separately. The rule is sometimes taught as being restricted based on the sound represented by the spelling. Two common restrictions are:
excluding cases where the spelling represents the "long a" sound (the lexical sets of FACE and perhaps SQUARE ). 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" sound (the lexical sets of FLEECE and perhaps NEAR and happY ). 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.
History of the spellings The Middle English language evolved from Old English after the Norman conquest, adding many loanwords from Norman French, whose sounds and spellings changed and were changed by the older English customs. In French loanwords, the digraph ⟨ie⟩ generally represented the sound [eː], while ⟨ei⟩ represented [ɛː]; ⟨ie⟩ was later extended to signify [eː] in non-French words. In the Great Vowel Shift, the sounds [eː] and [ɛː] were raised to [iː] and [eː] respectively. Later, the meet–meat merger saw the vowel in many [eː] words change to [iː], so that meat became a homonym of meet, while conceive now rhymed with believe. Early Modern English spelling was not fixed; many words were spelled with ⟨ie⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ interchangeably, in printed works of the 17th century and private correspondence of educated people into the 19th century.
History of the mnemonic The mnemonic (in its short form) is found as early as 1866, as a footnote in Manual of English Spelling, edited by schools inspector James Stuart Laurie from the work of a Tavistock schoolmaster named Marshall. Michael Quinion surmises the rhyme was already established before this date. An 1834 manual states a similar rule in prose; others in 1855 and 1862 use different rhymes. Many textbooks from the 1870s on use the same rhyme as Laurie's book. The restriction to the "long e" sound is explicitly made in the 1855 and 1862 books, and applied to the "I before E except after C" rhyme in an 1871 manual. Mark Wainwright's FAQ posting on the alt.usage.English newsgroup characterises this restricted version as British. The restriction may be implicit, or may be explicitly included as an extra line such as "when the sound is e" placed before or after the main part of the rhyme. A longer form excluding the "long a" sound is found in Rule 37 of Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's 1880 Rules for English Spelling, along with a list of the "chief exceptions":
"Dr Brewer" is credited as the author by subsequent writers quoting this form of the rhyme, which became common in American schools. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage discusses "i before e except after c". Henry Watson Fowler's original 1926 edition called the rule "very useful", restricting it to words with the "long e" sound, stating further that "words in which that sound is not invariable, as either, neither, inveigle, do not come under it", and calling seize "an important exception". The entry was retained in Ernest Gowers's 1965 revision. Robert Burchfield rewrote it for the 1996 edition, stating 'the rule can helpfully be extended "except when the word is pronounced with /eɪ/"', and giving a longer list of exceptions, including words excluded from Fowler's interpretation. Robert Allen's 2008 pocket edition states, "The traditional spelling rule ' i before e except after c ' should be extended to include the statement 'when the combination is pronounced -ee- '". Jeremy Butterfield's 2015 edition suggests both "when ... pronounced -ee-" and "except when ... pronounced -ay-" as extensions to the rhyme, as well as listing various classes of exception. In 1932 Leonard B. Wheat examined the rules and word lists found in various American elementary school spelling books. He calculated that, of the 3,876 words listed, 128 had ei or ie in the spelling; of these, 83 conformed to I-before-E, 6 to except-after-C, and 12 to sounded-like-A. He found 14 words with i-e in separate syllables, and 2 with e-i in separate syllables. This left 11 "irregular" words: 3 with cie (ancient, conscience, efficiency) and 8 with ei (either, foreign, foreigner, height, leisure, neither, seize, their). Wheat concluded, "If it were not for the fact that the jingle of the rule makes it easy to remember (although not necessarily easy to apply), the writer would recommend that the rule be reduced to 'I usually comes before e,' or that it be discarded entirely".
Modern views Sandra Wilde in 1990 claimed the sounded-like-E version of the rule was one of only two sound–letter correspondence rules worth teaching in elementary schools. The rule was covered by five of nine software programs for spelling education studied by Barbara Mullock in 2012. Edward Carney's 1994 Survey of English Spelling describes the ["long-e" version of the] rule as "peculiar":
Its practical use is ... simply deciding between two correspondences for /iː/ that are a visual metathesis of each other. It is not a general graphotactic rule applicable to other phonemes. So, although seize and heinous (if you pronounce it with /iː/ rather than /eɪ/) are exceptions, heifer, leisure with /e/≡⟨ei⟩ or rein, vein with /eɪ/≡⟨ei⟩ are not exceptions; ⟨ie⟩ is not a usual spelling of /e/ or /eɪ/. As to the usefulness of the rule, he says:
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