"I before E, except after C" is a mnemonic rule of thumb for English spelling. If one is unsure whether a word is spelled with the digraph ei or ie, the rhyme suggests that the correct order is ie unless the preceding letter is c, in which case it may be ei. The rhyme is very well known; Edward Carney calls it "this supreme, and for many people solitary, spelling rule". However, the short form quoted above has many common exceptions; for example: ie after c: species, science, sufficient ei not preceded by c: seize, vein, weird, their, feisty, foreign The proportion of exceptions can be reduced by restricting application of the rule based on the sound represented by the spelling. Two common restrictions are: excluding cases where the spelling represents the "long a" sound (the lexical sets of FACE and perhaps SQUARE ). This is commonly expressed by continuing the rhyme "or when sounding like A, as in neighbor or weigh" including only cases where the spelling represents the "long e" sound (the lexical sets of FLEECE and perhaps NEAR and happY ). Variant pronunciations of some words (such as heinous and neither) complicate application of sound-based restrictions, which do not eliminate all exceptions. Many authorities deprecate the rule as having too many exceptions to be worth learning. History of the spellings The Middle English language evolved from Old English after the Norman conquest, adding many loanwords from Norman French, whose sounds and spellings changed and were changed by the older English customs. In French loanwords, the digraph <ie> generally represented the sound , while <ei> represented ; <ie> was later extended to signify in non-French words. In the Great Vowel Shift, sounds and were raised to and respectively. Later, the meet–meat merger saw the vowel in many words change to , so that meat became a homonym of meet, while conceive now rhymed with believe. Early Modern English spelling was not fixed; many words were spelled with <ie> and <ei> interchangeably, in printed works of the seventeenth century and private correspondence of educated people into the nineteenth century. History of the mnemonic The mnemonic (in its short form) is found as early as 1866, as a footnote in Manual of English Spelling, edited by schools inspector James Stuart Laurie from the work of a Tavistock schoolmaster named Marshall. Michael Quinion surmises the rhyme was already established before this