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- See also: User:Soap/insert
Consonants
I initially wrote this list from memory, and then went looking for other lists of silent letters. This is the last diff that contains only the words I came up with on my own. The letters F, V, and Q are commonly said to never be silent, but I've found examples for F and V, and for QU, so if we count QU as a digraph (which it is), I can say that all letters in the English alphabet are silent in at least one established word.
B
C
CH
D
- ceilidh and other Gaelic loans
- Cholmondeley
- and (unstressed)
- handkerchief, sandwich, Wednesday
- adjust and other similar words before a stressed syllable. Other lists also have words like judge, which I would argue are not good examples because dg is functioning as a double consonant here, showing us that the vowel is short
Despite an abundance of silent d in French, I can't think of a single example in English apart from surnames like Michaud.
F
- halfpenny
- face can become hace in military contexts; see below under M. Possibly from the need to be heard in a noisy environment
- Possibly clef for some speakers
- fifth for some speakers
G
- reign
- phlegm
- gnome
- suggest, in some people's pronunciation, since we would expect the first g to be a hard /g/. Since it etymologically arises from a Latin assimilated /g:/, it seems the etymological pronunciation might be /dʒ/, but this logic doesn't explain the use of /ks/ in words like success.
GH
This is silent more often than not, but I'll give shillelagh as a more exotic example
H
J
- marijuana and similar Spanish names like Joaquin, Juan, and Tijuana
K
L
- could. Most other words with silent L have at least some speakers who pronounce it, but could etymologically never had an /l/
LL
- paella, because the e already ends in a /j/ sound in most dialects of English
M
- In military contexts, march is sometimes pronounced harch and since face can also become hace it could be said that the /h/ here is not a substitution but a re-insertion after deletion of the initial consonant. However, the h- spelling is used in these contexts.
N
P
PH
Q
I was not able to think of any words with silent q not followed by u, and most of them words like lacquer where it's more reasonable to argue that the c or some other letter is silent.
QU
- Colquhoun, however, retains the pronunciation one would expect if it were spelled Colhoun at least outside Scotland
R
The words below assume a rhotic dialect, meaning that their R's are silent even for people who normally pronounce every R.
S
- island
- isle (not cognate to the above) and many French loans
T
- ten-hut arose from a military use of the word attention, similar to harch and hace above.
TH
V
- fivepence, an obsolete pronunciation, but one that might well be still in use if its original currency was
- it's never, ever, over. These words are usually spelled with apostrophes when the /v/ is silent but people certainly still do it when speaking quickly
- Averham, Nottinghamshire, England
- Leveson-Gower, where the v spelling seems to be stylistic, as the name never had a /v/
W
- boatswain
- wrap and all other words with initial wr-. There are a few archaic words with wl-, like wlatsome, still listed in dictionaries, but we classify this word and probably all others with wl- as Middle English.
- sword, two. Possibly the only position in which a consonant other than h is silent before a stressed vowel. (Or before any vowel, if we analyse boatswain, listen, and others like it as ending in syllabic consonants.) The word swoop also had silent w historically.
- toward
- answer
- Towle (a surname); other examples exist, even words as simple as awl, but one could argue that the reduced word al would have a different vowel and so a word is needed where a redundant final -e is also present
- Many British towns ending in -wick; traditionally also a few outside Britain
X
Y
See also below under vowels.
- maypop. I choose this word because there is also macock, whose vowels are pronounced the same. Therefore the y is not necessary and can be considered silent. There are probably other words, but for example may cannot drop its y to become ma.
- yod-dropping dialects may omit the sound in foreign loanwords like Katyusha.
- Kyiv
Z
Vowels
In this section, the vowels are organized by letters, not by phonemes, because it is often impossible to decide what the original phoneme was or should have been.
A
- graham.
- Arguably in words like cleave, since the final -e already indicates a long vowel. It is sometimes said that a preceding /v/ negates this rule, but Rhymes:English/ɛv shows no words with ea.
- encyclopaedia, because although there is an alternate spelling with just an -e-, the vowel remains the same. The same is true of paediatrician formed from the same root; however, in many cases, classical words with -ae- have alternate forms in -e- where the pronunciation changes.
E
Finding silent E in English is trivial, but I will try to find examples that defy the well-known silent E rule and do not fit into its well-known exceptions, such as following v.
I
O
- Taliaferro
- leopard, people
- oenophile and many other classical borrowings with oe; some have alternate spellings with e that have a short vowel, however I suspect enophile, for which we have no pronunciation listed, retains its /i:/
- iron and (for some people) irony, unless we call this metathesis
U
- plaque
- liquor, since one would normally expect a /w/ sound here
- buy, build, buoy. At least the last once had a pronounced /w/ sound. This could arguably also provide a silent /o/ for the speakers who say /ˈbu.i/ or monosyllabic /ˈbui/ (not listed here, but this is my own pronunciation, making it a rhymeless word).
- Lady Dimitrescu
Y
- Pepys. Y can only be a vowel in this position, so I list it both here and under consonants.
- Wemyss