'I' before 'E' except after 'C'. But not 'their'. Any other exceptions to this rule?

Chief.

There’s what looks like a complete list here (and some other fun information)

http://alt-usage-english.org/I_before_E.html

So many:
beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign,
dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty,
foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige,
greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist,
leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient,
rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik,
society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight,
weir, weird
Above per Google

@papayalily that follows the rule….

“i before e except after c, or when sounding like ‘a’ like in neighbor and weigh.”

Words borrowed from other languages can be exempt. “Atheist,” as you have put, derives from Greek.

Tons. The rule is just meant to help kids avoid common mistakes like “recieve” or “beleive”; it’s not meant to be an absolute rule for English grammar (most English grammar “rules” have tons of exceptions anyway).

Think of it more like advice.

Science (unless there’s a tacitly understood preface in the rule that states when “i” and “e” combine to make a long “e” sound).

“I before e except after c” isn’t even the entire rule, so of course there are exceptions to it.
wikipedia has a good bunch of information about the mnemonic.

@uberbatman Oh, my god, you’re right…. Ok, so then how come my 5th grade teacher gave that as an example of one of the exceptions???

I agree with @DominicX. It’s not really a rule. It’s more to help school children learn the correct spelling for the most common mistakes.

Here’s a great video from Merriam Webster that’s just hilarious :Ask the Editor: ‘I Before E’

I before E except after C, if the sound is EE. Words like “their” and “atheist” do not have the “ei” part pronounced as “ee”.

What @downtide said.

I still have trouble with this rule once in awhile, of course being slightly dyslexic doesn’t help. lol

My own labeling which I think really just means that my brain and fingers get mixed up once in awhile. haha

heir (haha that was easy, it was contained in your question) though i like the extra explanation of the rule that downtide provided. I never heard that before. Then again, Nullo might have a point,too.

papayalily, maybe your teacher thinks that technically the i and the e are after a c even though there’s an h in between? who knows…. I did understand that the rule-of-thumb or rule whatever it is did state that the c had to be inmediately before the ei dipthong though

weird

science

@downtide

That would make sense for the exceptions that my Latin teacher gave us: either, neither, leisure, seizure, weird.

@DominicX – Of those spellings, there are alternate pronunciations for the first three that elimintate the “ee” sound.

However, no pedagogical rules – especially mnemonic devices – can really capture the complexities of a language’s orthography (we aren’t talking about grammar here), hence the exceptions that need to be introduced to any descrip[tive or prescriptive rule.

@noelleptc It is an effort to make some sense out of a wholly-organic language.

@noelleptc – make the language better, or make the rules better?

The rules, please. I’d like for my language to be quirky. :D