What’s the best spelling rule for “ie” vs “ei”?

Gah! I forgot foreign, forfeit, either, and protein. But I remembered surfeit? :confused:

Another … sovereign.

Okay, okay … so we’ve blown past ten. Maybe less than 25 common words? Former Marine Guy’s list is cool reading, but contains a lot of rare words.

The words in this sentence actually fit the rule for me, due to the “sounded as a” exception in the version I always heard.

I learned it as:

I before E, except after C, or when sounding like A, as in neighbor and weigh. What a weird society!

Wikipedia speaks.

I learned it as “i before e except after c, when the sound is ee

That deals nicely with many of the exceptions.

Seriously, we’re this far into the thread, and nobody has mentioned “their”?

Ditto, except for the caveat - the version I learnt was

’ i before e except after c, if it rhymes with ee ’

Interestingly I only heard the caveat from a friend when I was at Uni, he went to a very competent school - Winchester.

“I before e except after c or when sounded as a as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh,’ or weekends or holidays or all throughout May, and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say!"

Glacier, although I normally knew how to spell it, got me kicked out of the state spelling bee once, because I went with the rule. :frowning:

Brian Regan!

I was going to quote this as well!

:stuck_out_tongue:

Firefox with the spellchecker enabled.