silent letter
Written but unspoken
A silent letter is a letter in a word's spelling that isn't pronounced: the *k* in knife, the *b* in doubt, the *gh* in thought.
English is full of them, often remnants of older pronunciations that speech abandoned while spelling preserved.
They can signal meaning or origin—the silent *b* in debt was added by scholars to show its Latin root—but mostly they just make English spelling notoriously difficult to learn.
- muteWithout voice or sound
- ghostApparition of the dead
- whisperSpeech without full voice
- phonicsSound-based reading instruction
- pronunciation guideChart showing speech sounds
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