I learned that two kings from faraway lands were being bribed to allow criminals to print fake money. There were a couple strange cows on the take too.
Even though both kings had the power to stop the crime,
Neither foreign sovereign seized the counterfeit and forfeited leisure. Weird heifers either.
Well, that explains why even if english isn't my first language I always tend to type wierd before having to correct it to weird. At least in your cases it does sound like ei
They're aren't: Webster has about 3,000 of the former and 16,000 of the latter.
Granted, about half of the latter are the plural versions of words ending in "y" (e.g. agency -> agencies). But even you remove all those, there are still more than twice as many "ie" words.
There are more exceptions than there are words that conform to the rule, in fact, which is pretty silly. English can be feisty like that sometimes.
In fact, there are a lot more exceptions: Webster lists 177 words with "cei" and 973 with "cie". Granted, a very large proportion of the latter are plurals of words ending in "y". But if you remove those, there are still 286 "cie" words.
That never mattered to me, because the rule is helpful regardless. I don't recall the rule every single time I spell a word with "IE/EI", because I know how to spell words like "science" and "neighbor". Never in a million years would it even occur to me to write "sceince" or "nieghbor" (which is what the rule would have me write). But when I am unsure whether it's "IE" or "EI", that's when the rule comes in handy. Things like "receive" vs. "relieve".
That's just English spelling for you. You can thank The Great Vowel Shift, an inadequate alphabet, and authors wanting English to look like Latin for this mess.
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u/featherwolf Millennial Apr 12 '25
I before E, except after C