On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, Mark D. Mills wrote:
I before E except when it isn't... I threw grep at this starting from the scrabble list I have. 113801 words. 7842 have either 'ie' or 'ei' in them. 5099 once you remove the ones that END in '-ies' like "accuracies" 5009 once you remove words that END in '-eing' like "agreeing" 4618 once you remove words that START 'ei-' 'preim-' 'prein-' or END '-eism' '-eisms' '-eist' '-eists' '-eic' '-eings' '-cier' '-ciest' '-ein' '-eine' '-eins' '-eines' 4005 conform to the not-c followed by ie or cei rule. That's better than 86% against the wordlist! Once you kill the rare or combined suffixes that number will beat 90% '-ite' '-ity' '-i' '-ictic' '-ish' Also there are a couple of other words like reiterate and reissue that are prefix constructions that I missed. I think the point is that it depends on how you count. When doing spelling bees you learn the roots and rules to construct words from them. Then you learn the exceptions. I remember there being only 5 exceptions once you got all the rules and roots done. (their,either, neither, ancient, and *grr* *brain hurts* =) Enjoy =) Mark M. Common roots [common as in shared, I have no idea what some of these words mean =] acierate ancient apartheid beige corbeil dreidl efficient faciend geisha gneiss greige heifer height heil heinous heir inveigh neigh neither nonpareil obeisance rei reign sheik skein stein sleigh society speil speir their veil vein weigh weird prefixes/suffixes/roots that up the count... dei- (deify, deign -thei- (atheist, apartheid) -scien- (prescient, science) -feit (counter- sur- for-) seis- (seismograph) seiz- (seize, seizures) -beit (albeit, sobeit)
Wednesday, November 10th, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com