Silent letters

English is a tricky language for foreigners to learn, not least because of the silent letters in many of its words. In fact, silent letters cause difficulties for both native speakers and English learners because they make the spelling of words different from their pronunciation.

Silent letters in English usually reveal the origin and history of a word. In many cases, silent letters are the ghosts of pronunciations past. Every letter was once pronounced in the word 'knight' but it now has a silent k and gh and is pronounced /nite/.

The English language was rocked in the Middle Ages by the Great Vowel Shift which was a major phonetic change that affected how long vowels were spoken. These changes took place over the course of several centuries and eventually led to modern English pronunciations but with little or no changes being made to the spelling of affected words.

There's another factor too; when the printing press came to England, many of those who brought the new technology were Flemish and German. At that time spelling was still non-standard and had no fixed rules so the printers had free rein and sometimes added in a little something extra to make the words look more like the way they'd pronounce them back home.

Other words with silent letters have been borrowed from other languages, for example, “tsunami” from Japanese and “psychology” from the Greek. The consonant combinations ts and ps aren’t used at the beginning of words in English, so the first letters became silent so those words would better fit in with English’s phonological rules.

These quirky silent letters in words can be maddening at times but, like them or not, we’re stuck with them and just have to live with them. The list below will give you some idea of how extensive these silent sounds are in English. This list is by no means comprehensive; the situation is actually much worse! The only letter in English that is never silent is [v].

A : aisle, musically, logically, romantically, stoically

B : climb, comb, debt, doubt, numb, subtle, tomb, bomb, aplomb, bdellium, succumb

C : acquire, muscle, scissors, ascend, descent, fascinate, czar, incandescent, obscene, scenario, scented

CH : chthonic

D : Wednesday, sandwich, handsome, edge, bridge, handkerchief

E : hate, name, like, breathe, bored,

F : fifth

G : sign, champagne, reign, though, high, light, benign, gnarl, gnat, gnostic, phlegm

H : honest, hotel, heir, hour, ghost, what, whether, architect, chemistry, stomach, schizophrenia, rhythm

I : business

J : marijuana

K : knead, knife, knight, knock, knot, knapsack, knuckle