What do a ghost, Christmas, knitting, and a bomb have in common?
Or knees, a gnome, muscles, and Wednesday?
One of the quirks of the English language is our use of silent letters. They baffle, and bemuse. We don’t hear them, but they’re there. The t in castle, w in sword, s in island. Almost every letter in the alphabet can hide in plain sight, and crop up at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.
It’s believed around 60% of English words have a pesky silent letter. (French has a lot of them too.)
It can cause utter confusion to children learning how to read and write, especially when we teach them to ‘sound it out’ to help with the spelling. And for every rule that explains how a letter is pronounced, or a trick for spelling a word correctly, there’s often armfuls of exceptions where the rule doesn’t work. (But that might be a topic for another time.)
Silent letters can also be a source of frustration for anyone picking up English as a second language. It’s just, dumb!?
There are three main reasons – history, pronunciation, and the fact we’ve hoovered up words from so many other languages… Tsunami from Japan. Psychology has Greek origins. Rendezvous from French.
Many of the words we use come from old languages like Latin, Greek, or Old English. We’ve pinched them and often stuck with their original spelling, even if the way we say them has changed over time.
And for lovers of language, silent letters can give us a glimpse to the origins and history (etymology) of a word.
Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. Some of these exist because English inherited two different words that happen to sound the same, from different original language sources.
So, to help us pick out the difference, we mix up the spelling. Things like:
Hour and our, whole and hole.
Knew and new, knot and not.
See and sea, write and right.
Bee and be, in and inn, to, too, two.
Without the varied spellings, we wouldn’t know (no?) what someone’s trying to say.
Silent letters in English reflect the influence of three continental European languages: Latin, German, and French. Each one introduced words that are a hybrid of spelling and pronunciations from their roots. Thankfully, there are some things to look out for. 40% of all the words with a silent letter in English follow a pattern.
Silent b after m or t
B is always silent in when the spelling ends in mb: dumb, comb, plumber, thumb, climb, crumb, lamb. Or bt - doubt, debt.
Silent g before n or m
G is silent in the spelling sequence gm or gn: phlegm, gnarl, gnome, champagne, design, gnat, gnaw.
Silent k before n
Often a k sits silently before n. Knife, knuckle, knickers, knight, knowledge, knot, knock, knees, knob. This pattern has Germanic roots and dates back to the Old English era when the k’s weren’t silent.
Ds are quiet next to js
You won’t hear ds when it’s spelt next to a j. Like adjective, adjunct, adjacent...
When h goes quiet
H is silent in the spelling sequence gh – ghost, aghast, ghetto. And when it’s at the end of a word, ah, oh, eh.
There’s a silent p in science-y words
Often originating in Greek vocabulary, the silent p shows up in scientific terms, psychology, pneumonia, and pneumatics. But the p isn’t always silent. When it comes with h the ‘ph’ creates an f sound, like phobia, phrase, and physics.
Some spelling and pronunciation are simply difficult to predict. There are no rules we can apply - you just have to use them and remember their spelling.
• Island – the s silent even though it’s not part of a combination like ps or st. (And it has a silent s because it was added later to make it look Latin.)
• Muscle – the c is silent, but it doesn’t follow the quiet ‘c before i’ pattern like science and scissors.
• Subtle – the b is silent unlike table where the b is clearly pronounced.
I could go on, yacht, bridge, rhinoceros, autumn, mnemonic, whistle, wrong… And to add to the confusion, we introduce inert letters - sometimes a letter will be heard and others not:
• resign (g is not heard) resignation (g is heard)
• malign (g is not heard) malignant (g is heard)
• damn (n isn’t heard) damnation (n is heard)
While nearly all letters in the English language can (annoyingly) be silent. Some never are. You can trust an f, q, v, x, and z when you see it. Phew.
- - - - - - - - - -
This blog was inspired by Michael McIntyre's sketch all about the obscurity and unpredictability of silent letters. Watch it and have a laugh.
Perhaps we’ll all celebrate Silent Letter Day with him – on a Wednesday in autumn, or maybe February!?
- - - - - - - - - -
Leigh James (that’s me) is a Marketing Copywriter.
You can drop me a message, or scribble an email to me.
Photo credit – Giorgio Trovato | Unsplash