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With the help of dictionaries, I’ve assembled a list of letters that can be silent in English:

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For most letters, I found more than one example, what are the other examples of a silent z (rendezvous) and silent m (mnemonic)? Also, If we can think of examples of silent Qs or Vs.

Foyer- ?, am I right about the silent 'r', though there are no words in American English. However, I read it somewhere that BrE has some silent Rs.

tchrist
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adityasrivastav
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    Your examples for 'f' and 'v' aren't really fair; it's a double letter and you can't call it silent (or if you do, you have examples of simmer, terrain for 'm' and 'r'). Also, your example for 'r' doesn't work for most people in the U.S. and Canada. – Peter Shor Nov 19 '14 at 20:12
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    Is "j" really silent in marijuana? – Armen Ծիրունյան Nov 19 '14 at 20:13
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    For me, the L is not silent in talk. Neither is the N in damn. There is a subtle extra nasal resonance to damn. How on earth did you manage to declare the Y in mayor as silent? Its handkerchief, not hankerchief, for goodness' sake. – Blessed Geek Nov 19 '14 at 20:26
  • Please rectify and clarify, i may be wrong. And of course, it would be interesting to see comments from other users. – adityasrivastav Nov 19 '14 at 20:31
  • Can you call the "e" silent in "more" since it serves a purpose? I mean, I've always thought of a silent letter as a letter which doesn't change anything if you remove it from the word. Here, if you remove it then it makes a short "o". @BlessedGeek your take on "damn" is interesting but I can't think what sound it would make if you take out the "n"... – codeMagic Nov 19 '14 at 20:32
  • If you are in the US, there is a difference in pronunciation between dam and damn. The N pulls the pronunciation a little longer nasally as well as making the A longer. Like the E pulls sale a little longer than sal with a longer A. – Blessed Geek Nov 19 '14 at 21:13
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    This question is written by someone who is not familiar with the nuances of English pronunciation, obviously. Marijuana when pronounced originally, is the Spanish sound for J which is H. – Blessed Geek Nov 19 '14 at 21:14
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    @BlessedGeek. The standard pronunciation of the first two syllable of handkerchief is /ˈhæŋkə/. There is no /d/ in the spoken word. This is confirmed by both the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. – tunny Nov 19 '14 at 21:53
  • A few examples like Cholmondley (with silent ol..mond) would cut down on the number of words needed. – FumbleFingers Nov 19 '14 at 22:49
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    @FumbleFingers Even better, just ask Mr. Beauchamp Dalziel Featherstonehaugh (with silent au, p, alz, e, thersto, and eh) who, by some marvellous coincidence, happens to be precisely from Cholmondeley, though he was raised in Boyounagh (with silent o, ou, and gh). You’ll have to wait a bit, though: he’s currently busy celebrating Samhain (with ‘silent’ mhai). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 19 '14 at 23:00
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    @FumbleFingers Don't forget victuals and boatswain – Charles Nov 19 '14 at 23:45
  • @Charles: Not to mention *supercalifragil..[short mumble]..docious, which in certain* renditions could probably account for the entire alphabet in a single word. – FumbleFingers Nov 19 '14 at 23:52
  • This question appears to be off-topic because it is not asking a question at at all: it’s merely peeving, which is off-topic here. – tchrist Nov 20 '14 at 01:11
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    @Charles, going nautical is a great idea here. forecastle has a silent 're', 'a', and 't'. And gunwale has a silent 'w', 'a', and 'e'. – Peter Shor Nov 20 '14 at 01:20
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    The 'y' in mayor is not silent. – Ypnypn Nov 20 '14 at 02:07
  • @ArmenԾիրունյան - The J isn't really silent in "marijuana", since the J is pronounced as a soft H sound, consistent with Spanish pronunciation. (And I could argue that many of the other letters above are not "silent", as they represent partial sounds (not sure what the "legal" term is) that otherwise would be absent.) – Hot Licks Nov 20 '14 at 02:10
  • @Ypnypn I wanted to agree, but looking it up you get /ˈmāər/... where you either have to say that the y is silent (in this definition of silent!) or the o is silent and the y is acting as a vowel (in other words: the definition is bad). But, wow, English really is quite the mess when it comes to pronunciation :P . Apparently I have mispronounced talk all my life as well... – David Mulder Nov 20 '14 at 02:36
  • @PeterShor I KNEW there was a term I was missing. And that's the silent R the OP wanted. – Charles Nov 20 '14 at 03:54
  • @HotLicks: that's kind of funny, since the word in Spanish is "marihuana", where the h is fully silent. – Martin Argerami Nov 20 '14 at 07:24
  • @DavidMulder - Yeah, the L is definitely not silent in "talk". – Hot Licks Nov 20 '14 at 12:59
  • @HotLicks: /tôk/ ... – David Mulder Nov 20 '14 at 16:22
  • @DavidMulder - I don't find "o-hat" in any of the half-dozen pronunciation guides I just consulted via Google. But the "al" in "talk" is pronounced (in most of the US) as a slightly shortened version of the word "all", similar to its use in "chalk", "walk", etc. Removing the L sound would produce "tock". – Hot Licks Nov 20 '14 at 20:18
  • @HotLicks: So confused right now... I copied that from the google definition page... which now is showing /tɔːk/. Either way, going to post a question about it right now :) . – David Mulder Nov 20 '14 at 20:29
  • (There are folks in, I'm thinking, New England and along the Great Lakes who do pronounce "talk" as "tock". But I would not regard that as normal American pronunciation.) – Hot Licks Nov 20 '14 at 20:34
  • @HotLicks: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/209410/is-there-an-l-in-talk – David Mulder Nov 20 '14 at 20:41
  • This is a nice list and all, but it is not a question. Besides, as Prof. Lawler says, all letters in all words in all languages are silent. It's spoken language that gets written down, not written language that gets pronounced. And when the spoken language gets written down, what people really want to encode is not the pronunciation but the meaning, which includes encoding the word's etymology, and worse still, there are certain things about pronunciation that you specifically do not want to encode. As a result, any writing system at all is always an approximation and a compromise. – RegDwigнt Nov 21 '14 at 00:02
  • @Hot Licks: "The 'l' in talk* is pronounced in most of the US". Do you have any evidence for that? ... I think most of the US doesn't pronounce the 'l', although certainly some regions do. – Peter Shor Nov 21 '14 at 02:18
  • @PeterShor - Just my ears, and 65 years of listening. You can, eg, listen to the Boston accent of some of the folks on public TV and definitely hear "tock". And I have to believe that I wouldn't be hearing the difference if it wasn't there. – Hot Licks Nov 21 '14 at 02:22
  • @Hot Licks: Merriam-Webster doesn't even list the variant with the 'l'. I think that's pretty good evidence that the majority pronunciation is with no 'l'. – Peter Shor Nov 21 '14 at 02:25
  • @PeterShor - But when I listened to those two recordings on your other question I definitely heard the L. – Hot Licks Nov 21 '14 at 02:29
  • @Hot Licks: talk without the 'l' is not tock; talk rhymes with hawk, and tock rhymes with hock (unless you're from west of the Mississippi, where hawk and hock are homonyms). – Peter Shor Nov 21 '14 at 02:31
  • Whatever. The L and W are the same sound -- there is a sound there represented by those letters. – Hot Licks Nov 21 '14 at 02:33
  • @Ypnypn: the British pronunciation of mayor has a silent 'y'; it rhymes with prayer (or at least it used to; the American pronunciation is apparently catching on there). – Peter Shor Nov 21 '14 at 13:28
  • Related. – tchrist Oct 23 '22 at 16:51

4 Answers4

14

All letters in English are silent. Letters are visual signs, and they don't make any noise.

What you're all peeving about is the fact that

  • Modern English spellings don't represent Modern English pronunciations.

And it's true; they don't.
That's because they represent Middle English pronunciations.

Before Caxton set up his printshop in England in 1470 something, literate people speld inglish the way they spowke itt, and everyboddiz speling was diferent, juste as handewritting is nowe.

But printing always spelled the same words the same way. And so spelling got fixed before the finale of the Great Vowel Shift, which changed the place in the mouth where long (but not short) vowels were pronounced, and also totally destroyed the difference between long and short vowels in English.

The fact that English spelling is like Middle English is why Chaucer looks almost readable for modern English speakers when they see it, but is totally incomprehensible when presented spoken. We no longer understand the language that English spelling describes (and describes rather well, by the way -- the orthography is a decent phonemic accounting of Middle English).

So that made for lots of "silent letters". The rest are erroneous spellings (often, island), various stabs at diphthongs, and sounds that disappeared though their results didn't (all those gh spellings are remnants of the [x] allophone of Middle English /h/).

Don't think of them as silent letters. There their to distinguish things we don't dare distinguish in speech but somebody thought we'd like to know about, so we could screw them up in spelling
-- the difference between there, their, and they're, for instance.

John Lawler
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    While you're absolutely right, this information isn't super relevant to the question. The question is about "silent letters", a(n)—admittedly inaccurate—concept taught at the primary school level. In reality, very few letters are truly silent, as most affect the assumed pronunciation of the word (in one dialect or another) in this case serving as orthographic modifiers to the phonemes that the letters represent. – calvin Nov 19 '14 at 23:31
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    Only if you have access to the rules that they do it with, which is a synopsis of the phonological history of English and English borrowing. Roughly a one-year college course; which almost nobody ever takes, I might add. – John Lawler Nov 19 '14 at 23:32
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    One minor point: back in the day all those trailing 'e's (as in 'more', 'those', 'case', 'cause', and so on) were pronounced. So if I understand it correctly "more" was pronounced something like "maw-reh", "those" would have been similar to "thaw-seh", etc. – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Nov 20 '14 at 03:41
  • This reminds me that "ghoti" should be pronounced just like "fish" - just speak the letters as in "enou[gh]", "w[o]men", and "na[ti]on". – Hagen von Eitzen Nov 20 '14 at 09:21
  • That's a modern rubegoldbergism by Shaw; GHOTI would not be possible in Middle English, since GH never occurred initially; it represents the [x] allophone of ME /h/, which disappeared or changed into other fricatives). If it were read by a literate ME speaker, they would pronounce it as [xoti] or [hoti], depending on how they thought the author might have pronounced it; either vowel could be long, since it's obviously a foreign word. Of course, it doesn't mean anything in Middle English, so why would anybody read it? – John Lawler May 16 '15 at 15:22
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This is a list that I, a speaker of standard southern British English, compiled some time ago:

b: debt, subtle, lamb, tomb
c: science, rescind, muscle, indict, Leicester, Connecticut
ch: yacht
d: sandwich, Wednesday, grandson
g: gnaw, gnome, sign, phlegm, reign
h: heir, hour, dishonest, ghost, annihilate, vehicle, hurrah, rhyme, khaki, thyme
gh: although, through, thorough, bough, bought, taught
k: knee, knit, knife
l: calf, talk, salmon, could, should, would
p: pneumonia, psychiatry, ptomaine, corps, raspberry
r: iron

In RP, r is not pronounced when followed by a consonant or silent e, or is word-final: lord, tire, far

s: aisle, island, précis, viscount, corps, rendezvous
t: hasten, thistle, Christmas, soften, ballet, waltz
th: asthma (some speakers)
w: wren, two, answer,
x: grand prix, billet-doux
z: rendezvous

Mari-Lou A
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tunny
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    Ooh, you're going to get a number of people disagreeing with you. Be ready handbag, hurrah, and talk I think will be the contenders. :) Maybe you ought to specify your accent/regionality/dialect. – Mari-Lou A Nov 19 '14 at 22:09
  • @Mari-LouA. I am a speaker of standard southern British English. I am adding this to my response. I am sure there will be some varieties of English in which handbag and talk have no silent letters, but I don't think that there will be many in which the final h of hurrah is pronounced. – tunny Nov 19 '14 at 22:17
  • My misunderstanding, I thought you intended both the first and last -h. I pronounce the first -h – Mari-Lou A Nov 19 '14 at 22:26
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    Are you sure about "waltz"? You pronounce it to rhyme with "lolz" rather than "volts"? – David Richerby Nov 20 '14 at 00:04
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    @David I pronounce lolz like lulls, and waltz without the t would just be walls. I'm not sure by your comparisons if that makes us in agreement or not..? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 20 '14 at 00:25
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    iron is not pronounced like ion - eye-on. . it is closer to i-o-rn. – Oldcat Nov 20 '14 at 00:35
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    @Oldcat tunny's answer is for a southern British English dialect. I pronounce iron like "eye-urn" but in many places (including southern British English, I expect) it's closer to "eye-un", with no trace of an "r" sound. – calvin Nov 20 '14 at 00:46
  • I think you would probably be more clear if you said "Received Pronunciation" as opposed to "standard southern British English", that term is not widely used and is actually somewhat misleading as it does not reflect the modern state of most southern British accents (I can attest to this being fairly familiar with Received Pronunciation and residing in Hampshire and travelling frequently in the south east) – Vality Nov 20 '14 at 02:51
  • And an aside, I am surprised that you consider the final h in hurrah to be silent, it's sound does become a little indistinct but it has the effect of lengthening and softening the a and I do often hear a hint of the h sound at the end of that softened a. – Vality Nov 20 '14 at 02:55
  • @Vality. RP, though widely used, is not a precisely defined variety. The term I used also has faults, but I really can't see how it "does not reflect the state of most modern southern British accents". The letter h may denote a certain pronunciation of the preceding a, but it is not itself sounded in any variety of English that I know. – tunny Nov 20 '14 at 07:05
  • Huh, as a Northern BrEng speaker, I pronounce all of the 'd's in your 'd' example. – James Webster Nov 20 '14 at 21:21
  • @Mari-LouA. I, personally, normally choose not to take it upon myself to improve answers people have given unless there is an obvious typo. If I think something could have been more appropriately expressed/formatted, I normally comment on this rather than assume that I know better than the person who has taken the time and trouble to compose an answer. Having said that, I am past the stage where I get upset when people edit my considered responses. Still, I am happy to see that you removed the (in my opinion) clutter that I deliberately chose not to add to my original answer. – tunny Nov 20 '14 at 21:22
  • @JamesWebster. Why the 'huh'? I presented my list as one composed by one speaker of standard southern British English. I made no claim that my pronunciation was correct or universal. – tunny Nov 20 '14 at 21:27
  • I was just surprised to find that I pronounced those letters, I hadn't really noticed or thought about silent "d"s before. – James Webster Nov 20 '14 at 21:30
  • @Mari-LouA. Yup, I probably did imply 'thank you'. I should have said it. Sorry. – tunny Nov 20 '14 at 21:35
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    Only teasing. Glad my meddling didn't annoy you. – Mari-Lou A Nov 20 '14 at 21:36
  • @JamesWebster. Until I started studying phonetics and being obliged to listen to recordings of myself speaking, I would have sworn that I pronounced the /d/ in those words. I soon had to accept that I didn't./don't. I know that speakers of other dialects/varieties do. – tunny Nov 20 '14 at 21:38
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You need to revisit your list. It's erroneous.

Silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation.

Please consider the various comments above and also these silent letters.

F/J/Q/V/Y: There are no words (I could recall) that take a silent letter.

  • R- Yes, there are no words in American English. BrE has some silent Rs.
  • Z - laissez-faire, rendezvous

If Etymology (the origin of words) interests you, then you’ll find learning silent letters very fascinating, as they provide so much information about the history of these words!

weakphoneme
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  • dossier is pronounced with the r? – Gitty Nov 19 '14 at 22:04
  • @gitty yes, it is. at least that's how i've always heard it. – user428517 Nov 19 '14 at 22:36
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    @weakphoneme. There's a silent j in hallelujah. There was a silent f in the old pronunciation of the British halfpenny – tunny Nov 19 '14 at 22:49
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    @tunny You don’t pronounce the j in hallelujah? You pronounce it halleluah? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 19 '14 at 22:55
  • @JanusBahsJacquet.I was wrong. It is not silent, but pronounced /j/ – tunny Nov 19 '14 at 22:58
  • Laissez-faire and rendezvous are both French. How can they be considered English words if they are borrowed directly from French with the same meanings? Just unsure. – This account is dead Nov 19 '14 at 23:13
  • @gitty It really depends on the dialect. +sgroves – calvin Nov 19 '14 at 23:43
  • @Oedipus: Lots of English words are borrowed from French, some just more recently and obviously than others. "Rendezvous", at least, has pretty clearly entered standard English vocabulary. Besides, despite the obvious French influence, both the English pronunciation and the spelling of "rendezvous" are actually quite distinct from the French rendez-vous. – Ilmari Karonen Nov 20 '14 at 00:31
  • @ilmari karonen How do you say rendezvous? – This account is dead Nov 20 '14 at 01:11
  • @Oedipus French has [ʁɑ̃devu] with a “silent” n, z, o, s. English has [ˈɻʷɒndəvu], which has a stressed syllable and a reduced one, and a completely different rhotic. As has been remarked, those quite distinct from each other. – tchrist Nov 20 '14 at 01:22
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    Properly pronounced, "forecastle" has a silent 'r' in American English. (Also a silent 'a', 't', and 'e'.) The landlubber pronunciation is wrong. – Peter Shor Nov 20 '14 at 01:26
  • Isn't there a silent 'y' in "prayer"? It's pronounced the same way as "aerial"; if it wasn't silent, it would rhyme with "layer". – Peter Shor Nov 21 '14 at 13:26
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The original question was asking about silent "z" and silent "m"

Silent "z" occurs in recent French loans: "laissez-faire", "répondez s'il vous plait" and the already mentioned "rendezvous".

Silent "m" occurs in initial Greek-derived mn-: "mnemonic", "Mnemosyne", but is pronounced after a prefix (amnesia).

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