Never very good at spelling…
It seems that when adding ing to words that end with the letter e, sometimes you leave the e and sometimes you drop it. Is there a rule for when the e should be dropped or kept?
If it is a silent e you drop it before adding ing.
Apart from a few words where the e follows a vowel - hoeing, not hoing, for example.
Pardon my stupidity… isn’t the e always silent?
sauteing
flambeing
Although, then there’s words like
bingeing
which, like the aforementioned hoeing, might look bizarre without the e.
There is also regional variation: I believe the British write *ageing *while the Americans write aging. The same goes for other suffixes: judgement / judgment.
Final -e is usually dropped before adding -ing. The exceptions are for clarity’s sake: where the -e is pronounced, where it changes the pronunciation of the basic word, etc.
Note that -ie often gets converted to -y before -ing, for example lie > lying, in both the meanings “recline” and “prevaricate.”
The coalescence of these two “rules” (actually descriptive summaries of standard written usage) gives die > dying but dye > dyeing.
Notice that sometimes final letters are doubled or a final -c becomes -ck before -ing, for the same reasons: picnicking rather than picnicing, which almost looks like it should have a “nice” sound in the middle; To mat becomes matting because mating would appear to be the participle for “to mate.”
The non-silent ‘e’ probably betrays the French origin of both words i.e. sauté and flambé.
Incidentally, looking up ‘flambeing’ on google provokes the enquiry ‘Did you mean flamingo?’
Are you saying that there are no non-silent [e]s that aren’t French accents aigus? How about the sentence, “They were agreeing that seeing the peeing was freeing.”
Of course, if you object to counting originally French words as English, your post should read:
The [del]non-silent[/del] ‘e’ [del]probab[/del]ly be[del]tray[/del]s the French [del]origin[/del] of both words i.e. sauté and flambé.
I didn’t say anything of the kind.
This sentence makes no sense to me whatsoever.
Exactly. It doesn’t make sense because all of the French-derived words are cut out.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Sorry — I was a bit confused by the discussion, which seemed to go:
Daddypants: Isn’t [e] always silent in [-eing]?
gigi: No, for example sautéing and flambéing.
Chez Guevara: But those are French.
Me: 
What does their French origin have to do with anything? Perhaps it’s that this is [é]; I’ll point out some long-e examples in English.
Apologies if I misunderstood.
The proposition is that ‘flambé - flambe’ and ‘sauté - saute’ and other words ending in ‘é’ in the original French will not drop the ‘e’ in constructing the present participle because the implied ‘é’ forms an essential part of those words.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I could have been clearer.
Some variations of the themes mentioned by Polycarp:
Birdieing, to make a birdie. I guess others decided that “birdying” looked too weird.
Dieing, the making of a die (as in casting). To avoid confusion with “dying” I guess. Cf. the “dyeing” cite above.
Garnisheeing: Just throwing this one in since it looks so odd. (To make someone into a garnishee.) Also got “trusteeing”. Ugh.
Singeing: ooh, another nice example of why you need to keep the “e”. “Tingeing” also turns up. Those “inge” endings seem to a relatively common exception.
And…
Fricasseeing: for you Francophones.
Ain’t computer dictionaries grand?
It’s not just accented es that are pronounced.
e.g. “sing” versus “singe”. The “e” isn’t pronounced on its own but it does modify the “g”. So sing -> singing but singe -> singeing.
(Edit: er, yeah, what ftg said!)
A good rule of thumb, to answer the OP, is that if the “e” is needed for reasons of pronunciation or to avoid ambiguity, then it is left in. Otherwise, take it out. But there are often variant spellings, e.g. gluing/glueing, aging/ageing, where either is acceptable (somethimes with regional differences).
I staunchly disbelieve that there’s such thing as an “e” before an “i” anywhere. In that regard, I’m the athiest person I know.
This reminds me of a story I once heard told by Spike Milligan (I think) about Peter Sellars, when they were both in the Goon Show:
Peter received a letter from a fan requesting “a singed photograph.” He got a photograph of himself, and a match, and carefully burned the edges of the photo before putting it in an envelope and sending it off to the fan. Some days later he got a letter back thanking him for the photo, but complaining that it was “signed all round the edges.”
Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Of course, Spike told it much better.