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In 1932 Leonard B. Wheat examined the rules and word lists found in various American elementary school spelling books. He calculated that, of the 3,876 words listed, 128 had ei or ie in the spelling; of these, 83 conformed to I-before-E, 6 to except
Words in the set that had ENE /iː/ (Middle English /eː/) are mostly spelled ee (meet, green, etc.), with a single e in monosyllables (be, me) or followed by a single consonant and a vowel letter (these, Peter), sometimes ie or ei (believe, ceiling), or irregularly (key, people).
may be pronounced as a diphthong, but also as [ie] in hiatus or separated by a semivowel, [ije]. For example, in the first line of the national anthem of Croatia , Lijepa naša domovina , ije is pronounced as a diphthong, but in the first line of the national anthem of Montenegro , Oj, svijetla majska zoro , ije is pronounced as two syllables.
The result is that English spelling patterns vary considerably in the degree to which they follow rules. For example, the letters ee almost always represent / iː / (e.g., meet), but the sound can also be represented by the letters e, i and y and digraphs ie, ei, or ea (e.g., she, sardine, sunny, chief, seize, eat).
If you've ever second-guessed yourself while trying to spell words like "beautiful," "receive," and "license," you're far from the only one. The post 21 Commonly Misspelled Words and How to Spell ...
In accents that preserve the distinction, the phoneme /ei/ is usually represented by the spellings ai, ay, ei and ey as in day, play, rain, pain, maid, rein, they etc. and the phoneme /eː/ is usually represented by aCe as in pane, plane, lane, late etc. and sometimes by é and e as in re, café, Santa Fe etc.
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Its irregularities are caused mainly by the use of many different spellings for some of its sounds, such as /uː/, /iː/ and /oʊ/ (too, true, shoe, flew, through; sleeve, leave, even, seize, siege; stole, coal, bowl, roll, old, mould), and the use of identical sequences for spelling different sounds (over, oven, move).