how to spell: silent letter spelling rules

how to spell: silent letters and why they aren't there to mess with your brain - honest.
Silent letters are the letters in words that are not pronounced but make a huge difference to the meaning and sometimes the pronunciation of the whole word.

The bad news is that more than 60% of English words have silent letters in them which can cause all sorts of problems spelling the word or looking for the word in a dictionary.

Silent letters aren't there to mess with your brain - honest. They're there for various reasons and so identifying and understanding them will definitely help your spelling, writing and confidence. Let's go over these reasons:

First of all, they help the reader to distinguish between homophones (homophones have the Same sound but different meaning and different spelling and there are loads of these nightmare words in English) in/inn, be/bee,to/too/two, know/no, whole/hole, knot/not,

A silent letter can help us work out the meaning of the word and it also can change the pronunciation even though it's silent - sin/sign, rat/rate


Magic 'e' - if you add 'e' at the end of short vowel sound words it elongates the sound - rid/ride, cop/cope, hat/hate, tap/tape, at/ate, mat/mate, (check out my magic 'e' video ).

Sometimes people might pronounce certain letters or they might not depending on their accent, for example the t in 'often' can be pronounced or not.

H is silent in a lot of accents. For me h is a difficult letter to pronounce because I grew up dropping the hand my muscle memory doesn't like it at all!
But the H is silent in some words from French - hour, honest, honour, heir, herb (in American)


Understanding the history of English spelling is one of the most important ways to understand, remember and learn spelling. Silent letters in words like: knock, plumber, island, gnat, daughter, night, doubt, receipt show the history and origins of the word.

Plumber is a Roman/Latin word from the Roman for lead pipe - plum bum.

That difficult -gh- letter pattern is from the Anglo- Saxons - Daughter, night, dough, bright... the -gh- used to be pronounced like the Scottish loch, a hard sound - until the French invaded and messed around with our spelling.

Knife, knock, know, gnat, gnaw are all Viking words which used to be pronounced but not now but we leave the letters in there to see the origin and history of the word (in Sweden they still say the silent letter in knife kneefe)

Most of these silent letters were pronounced for centuries then they became silent but the spelling was already fixed with these spellings.

Also our spelling system was phonetic until the French, and the 16th Century academics messed around with our spelling. I talk about all this and who's responsible for our 'chaotic' spelling in my new ebook The Reasons Why English Spelling is so Weird and Wonderful. It's packed with information and will help you get your head round English spelling - go to my website www.howtospell.co.uk.


Now let's continue with the lesson
The good news is there are some rules about what letters are silent before or after certain letters ( but like all English spelling rules there are exceptions to the rule).



A few silent letter rules but like all English spelling rules there are always exceptions.
'k' is often silent before 'n' - knee, know, knuckle, knock...
'w' is often silent before 'r' - write, wrist, wrong, wrap...
'g' is often silent before 'n' - gnat, gnaw, gnash, gnarl...
'p' is often silent before 's' - psychic, psalm, psychology, psychiatry...

'l' is often silent before 'k' - folk, walk, talk, yolk...
'b' is often silent after 'm' - plumber, numb, dumb, bomb, comb, climb, thumb...
'n' is often silent after 'm' - autumn, column, solemn, hymn...
't' is often silent after 's' - listen, fasten, glisten, castle...
I'll discuss these in my History of English spelling ebook - get instant online download at www.howtospell.co.uk and there's a free audio version of the book.


Thanks so much for watching.

Thanks to Johanna Stirling's Teaching Spelling book

Thank you to Oxford Dictionaries online

Thanks to Elaine Miles' English words and their spellings.