Weird Words

		Lots of things get drummed into us whilst we are at school; mathematical tables, grammar and dates of famous historical events are just a few of the things we have learned parrot fashion. And it's not uncommon that we are given a set of simple rules which allow us to determine a lot of things by just referring to that rule. Two of the most common rules hammered into us by teachers are that, "A leap year is one where the year number is divisible by four without leaving any remainder", and, in spelling, that it's, "I before E, except after C". The trouble is that if we take these at face value, and assume them to be complete rules, we discover, in later life, that we have been entirely wrong in our application of those rules. The misunderstanding of the Leap Year Rules has contributed to, what has become known as the Y2K bug and the, recent, popularly echoed, view of when a new millennium starts is causing an incredible amount of belief in a total falsehood. Whilst proving that some rules we have been given are either incomplete or in error is not an easy task, requiring access to scientific papers or other documents which aren't easy to obtain, or even understand, the, "I before E, except after C", rule can be easily disproved by simply looking through a dictionary. Now okay, it's not easy ploughing through a dictionary trying to find the words which disprove the rule, so there's a list at the end of this page; all you need to do is to check that the word is indeed included in your dictionary and the rule is proven not to be correct in all cases. So next time someone tells you it's, "I before E, except after C", you can quite justifiably add, "Except in the case of over two hundred words". Weird, how easy it is to break some rules, isn't it. I before E, except after C - disproved I before E, when after C If it's, "I before E, except after C", then it is implied that it is always, "I after E, when after C", but even that's not true. Words ending with 'cy', whose plural forms would end 'cies', have been left off the list. Including those would have added just under forty words. Many thanks to Ian Baill for suggesting the inclusion of this list.
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First published sometime before Thursday the 16th of February, 2000 Last upload was on Tuesday the 23rd of September, 2003 at 18:23:54