Skein, Neighbor, Weigh

The word skein follows a rule I learned from my old-lady school teacher in the first grade:

i before e,
Except after c,
Or when sounded like "a,"
As in neighbor and weigh.

Evidently this little ditty has been around in school books since the 1870s or so. And, although the rule has many exceptions, the word "skein" is not one of them. For it is pronounced as if it had a long a, n, and e: skane.

Originally a skein was a specific length of yarn, depending on the type of fiber. Let wool be our example here. A skein used to be 80 yards of hand-spun wool, as measured on a spinner's weasel or clock wheel, a type of winder two yards in circumference, with a gear ratio of 40:1. When the yarn reached 80 yards, the weasel made the popping noise we know from the nursery rhyme, "Pop Goes the Weasel." The round of yarn was removed from the winder and tied with yarn in four places for washing, dyeing, and drying.

Skein started as a lovely old Middle English word, skeyne, meaning a certain length of hand-spun wool or another fiber from Middle French escagne and from Vulgar Latin scamnia, from scamniare, to wind yarn.

The first known use of the word skein was in the 1300s, the century in which Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) lived.

Now yarn is sold in skeins or balls by weight, not by length. A typical skein of yarn weighs 25 or 50 grams, but varies in length depending, of course, on the weight of the fiber.