weird, beige…any other exceptions to the rule?
Two others are:[ul]
[li] neither[/li][li]either[/ul][/li]
And then there is my last name that contains “nei”.
The whole rule is “I before E execpt after C, except when sounded like ‘ay’ as in neighbor and weigh.” But, of course, there are exceptions to that too.
-Loopus
Yeah, like weird.
seismology
prescient
science
height
counterfeit
Neither leisured foreign counterfeiter could attain either weird height without forfeiting protein.
My neighbor’s eight beige reindeer weight too much to be sent by freight.
Those are the only ones I know.
THANK YOU.
That has always bugged me. All these silly little rules in the English language that don’t make any sense because there are always exceptions. I’m just glad to see someone else is bothered enough by them to point it out.
PS -> I’m not crazy… anymore.
I might note, by the way, that ultrafilter’s second example sentence does not contain any exceptions to the rule, since all of those "ei"s are sounded as “a”.
There are only feisty exceptions to this rule
To be honest, I’d never really heard that part of the rule before. Guess my grade school education needed some work.
In a high-school English class, we were taught a longer version of the “I before E” that listed several more types of exceptions (covering almost all of them). At the time I thought it was easy to remember…but now I don’t.
Does anyone know the long version of this rhyme?
We discussed this a couple years ago, but apparently the archives no longer go back that far.
I kept a list for a while, which I can no longer find. But some other examples which I don’t believe have been mentioned include:
their
heir
conscience
seize
– Beruang
A great book on this is: A MANUAL OF EMAIL STYLE. It has quite a list of this & also other weird english things we were taught & why & the exceptions.
This, of course, is why God gave us spell check software - and, I trust, dictionary editors who know all these rules and exceptions…