A quick test with grep says there are only about five times as many IE words as EI, so it’s not actually a very good rule, contrary to what we were all taught in primary school! The rule that Q is always followed by U works much better: only 42 exceptions in /usr/share/dict/words, and they’re all proper nouns, acronyms or abbreviations.
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A quick test with grep says there are only about five times as many IE words as EI, so it’s not actually a very good rule, contrary to what we were all taught in primary school! The rule that Q is always followed by U works much better: only 42 exceptions in /usr/share/dict/words, and they’re all proper nouns, acronyms or abbreviations.
Nice!
Our teacher always used to correct us “I before E except after C when the sound is E, E before I except after C when the sound is A”.
…and that works for more-or-less of the words in that picture, depending on how you pronounce them.
…but really far fewer than I expected!