Why is weird not i before e

I agree strongly with Cyngifier: More interesting to me in this article is the rendering of some of the pronunciations.

To-may-to, to-mah-to. The closing paragraph made me laugh. As adults, we have choices of memorizing the less-used words or looking them up. For people with adult vocabularies, the rule is probably kind of useless. Something being dialectical does not exempt it from the standards of Standard, but precisely the opposite. The short E is British, not American. Americans can and some do use the short E. That is either dialectical or simply affected. That would spare us miseries like speSSies.

Those preceding As, Os, Us, and consonants are as Ks. Or using A or AN depends on whether the following word begins with a vowel sound, not necessarily a vowel letter.

In Canadian English, leisure and measure are rhymes, both pronounced with a short E. Here, I have never heard the pronunciation may-zhure that one hears in some of the U. Admittedly, under the overwhelming influence of U. That was before everyone in business and government started talking about "leveraging" whatever it is people leverage. I agree with Brian Gaines. That greatly reduces the number of exceptions.

I had been thinking the same thoughts already. Furthermore, this series of columns is based on North American English look at the identities of the writers and the moderators. People who live on the other sides of certain oceans, please concede that fact. There is a mnemonic device that has been taught to help individuals learn the spelling of some words. And weird is just weird.

We will look at these exceptions below. There are many words that are commonly thought of as being exceptions, but are in fact spelled correctly. There is no easy way to remember these words. My next door neighbours are always really loud. The doctor weighed the boy to see if he was a healthy weight. This rule should be considered as a guideline, because there are some words that do not follow this rule, such as: height , either , leisure , science and foreign. Head of School: Sarah Morse smorse twinuk.

Principal: Tracey Cook tcook twinuk. College Manager: Mick Leonard mleonard twinireland. Get all the latest and exclusive offers with our newsletter! S scarabaeid schlockmeister science seeing seignior seignorial seine seism seismic seize sensei sheik skein sleigh sleight sovereign stein surfeit surveil surveillance.

T their theism therein. V veil vein. W weigh weighing weighings weighs weight weir weird wherein whereinto. X xanthein. Y yuccie. Z zeitgeist zootheism. Namespaces Category Discussion. Views Read View source History.