Why English Words Have So Many Silent Letters

Silent letters may feel like they exist just to make crossword puzzles and games of Scrabble more difficult. But they actually serve various useful functions. For one thing, they can help etymologists understand the origins of certain words, as well as their connections to other dialects. Silent letters are also helpful for discerning between homophones — how else would you tell “knight” and “night” apart? Here are some of the more common silent letter patterns we see in English and why they exist.

While some letters operate in silence more frequently than others, there are examples of all 26 letters in the English alphabet appearing in a silent form. Roughly half of them show up silently quite often. 

Take the letter “L,” for instance, which is silent in “salmon” and “chalk,” to name a couple of examples. “W” also makes frequent appearances as a silent letter, such as in “wrestle” and “sword.” Even the letters “X” and “Z” — which typically have rather strong sounds — are silent in the French loanwords “faux pas” and “chez.”

Silent letter patterns may trip up anyone who’s learning English, but many are quite familiar to fluent and native speakers. For instance, you’ll often see a silent “K” or “G” appearing before the letter “N,” as in the words “knight” and “gnome.” This spelling is a relic of how those words were pronounced hundreds of years ago, when the letters “K” and “G” were said aloud in conjunction with the /n/ sound. Over time, those words were simplified into a single /n/ sound, as it was easier to say, but the spellings remained fossilized examples of those former pronunciations.

You’ll also often find a silent “B” after the letter “M,” as in “comb,” “crumb,” and “limb.” This, too, is due to the fact the “B” used to be pronounced with the “M” before those sound clusters evolved and were simplified into just an /m/.

When a word begins with a silent “P,” it signifies that it likely has ties to the Greek language. “Psychology” and “pneumonia” are both Greek in origin, with psukhē meaning “soul, mind,” and pneumōn meaning “lung.” The ancient Greeks pronounced the “P,” as do German and French speakers today. But English speakers dropped it, as doing so made the words easier to say, a linguistic process called historical sound change. In 1909, Oxford English Dictionary editor J. A. H. Murray argued in favor of restoring that “P” sound in English, but his recommendations were largely ignored.

Words that start with a silent “H” are also indicative of their original language. “Honest” and “hour” are both derived from Latin, where the “H” sound was pronounced. But that “H” sound weakened as Latin evolved into Romance languages such as Spanish and French, both of which are among the many languages with examples of a silent “H.”

While many English words may have only a single silent letter or perhaps two, some really lean into the idea. One example with a staggering five silent letters is the British English term “ploughwright” (pronounced “PLOW-rite”) meaning “a person who makes ploughs.” The five silent letters include both sets of “gh” as well as the “w.”

There’s another chiefly British word with many silent letters that’s also quite common in American English: the word “queue.” (Do you think it contains three or four silent letters? It’s up for debate.) “Queue” is a helpful example of how silent letters play a key role in discerning between homophones, given that “queue” (“a waiting line”) has a much different meaning than just the letter “Q.”