CHAPTER 55

Silent Consonants:

h, g, k, p, w, b, l, n, t, c, d, s, m, r, ch

Most languages have one or two letters that may occasionally be silent, depending on the spelling or the

punctuation. Thanks to its history of borrowing, however, English clearly has more than its fair share of
letters that are sometimes not pronounced. In fact, almost all of the letters of the alphabet are, at one time
or another, silent letters.
There are two main reasons why we have so many silent letters. First, the letter is part of the original
word which has changed over time with, perhaps, the addition of affixes or compounding. The resulting
words have left us with letters that we no longer pronounce. Second, imported words that have not yet
been fully assimilated and anglicized sometimes contain silent letters. There are many examples of
borrowed words that have been in our dictionaries for generations and probably never will be anglicized.
Because vowels are often silent, especially when they are part of a diphthong, we shall look only at the
silent consonants. For the silent e, see Chapter 6.
The most common of the silent letters is the h, which can appear at the beginning of a word, in the
middle, or at the end. It appears in an extraordinary variety of words and is usually followed by a vowel.

(^) Almost as common is the silent g, which appears most frequently as the initial letter of a word but can
also be found in the middle of a word. The silent g is almost always followed by an m or an n:
(^) The silent k usually appears at the beginning of a word and is almost always followed by n:
(^) The silent p is quite versatile. It can appear at the end, in the middle, or at the beginning of a word. The
majority (but not all) of these words are of Greek origin:
(^) The silent w most often appears at the beginning of a word and is usually followed by r, though there
are exceptions:
(^) The silent b is usually found at the end or near the end of a word. In most cases. it follows the letter m:
(^) The silent l usually appears in the middle of a word and is followed by a consonant. It is most often
preceded by the letter a: