ei or ie?

#usage Published: 2021-11-16

Have you ever confused the spelling “ei” with the spelling “ie”? For example, can you immediately tell which is correct, “receive” or “recieve”? To be honest, sometimes I was not 100% percent sure which was right.

As for the two spellings “ei” and “ie” pronounced as /i/, there is a simple rule: “I before E except after C”¹. This is a well-known mnemonic rule for correct spelling. Precisely speaking, the rule is as follows.

• “ei”: right after the letter “c”
• “ie”: otherwise

Almost all the spellings of common words follow this rule. For example:

• ceiling, receive, deceive, receipt
• achieve, believe, relieve, sieve

Of course, there are some exceptions. Looking at the list of the exceptions, however, I didn’t find many words that we really need to pay attention to. Let me share them a little bit.

seize, weird, sheik

In my opinion, these three words² are definitely exceptions that we need to be careful with (if you know that some people pronounce “sheik” as /ʃeɪk/, then sheik is not really confusing).

protein, caffeine, codeine

Chemical names often have an “ei” spelling, pronounced /i/. These may be confusing, especially for native speakers³, but in Japanese, we have the corresponding words, プロテイン, カフェイン, コデイン, respectively, which tell us clearly how they are spelled.

obeisance

Obeisance⁴ can be thought of as an exception. But it is obviously derived from the word “obey”, so it cannot be “obiesance”.

onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia⁵ can be regarded as an exception as well, but this spelling is a bit odd in the first place anyway.

species

I don’t think this is so confusing because “-ies” fits better than “-eis” at the end of the word.

heinous

If you pronounce this word as /ˈhiːnəs/, the spelling may be confusing. But I didn’t even know that this word could be pronounced this way (and just to make sure, I checked https://youglish.com/pronounce/heinous/english/us).

leisure, either (neither)

It is well-known that these words are also pronounced as /ˈlɛʒər/, /ˈaɪðər/ (/ˈnaɪðər/), respectively, from which we can figure out the spellings (really?).

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