Why English is full of silent letters

0:00 It is perfectly normal for a language to have silent letters.

0:03 But with English… It’s just got way out of hand.

0:07 Without doubt.

0:09 It’s been said that every single letter

0:11 of the alphabet can be silent in English.

0:14 So let’s put that to the test and find out how our language ended up this way.

0:20 Welcome to another RobWords.

0:24 English does have an extraordinary number of words with silent letters.

0:27 I mean, just look at them.

0:29 But for each of them, there is an explanation.

0:33 Some of these explanations are historically fascinating.

0:36 Some of them offer extraordinary insights into the ways in which we speak.

0:41 And some of them… are just really irritating.

0:44 I think you’re going to agree.

0:46 So, let’s see if indeed every letter of the alphabet can be

0:50 silent in English Because I must admit I’m a little bit skeptical.

0:54 Just keep an eye on this up here as we tick them

0:57 off and we’ll see if by the end there are any letters left.

1:01 So where to start?

1:02 Well, I reckon the default assumption when we see a silent letter

1:05 in a word is that at some point that letter must have been pronounced.

1:09 At one point people were saying “recei-p-t” and “de-b-t”.

1:13 Of course they were.

1:14 We just got lazy over time and stopped pronouncing them.

1:18 So what if I were to tell you that the P

1:22 in receipt and B in debt were never pronounced?

1:25 Because they weren’t.

1:27 This is how the word debt was spelled when

1:30 we borrowed it from French around 700 years ago.

1:32 In fact, it’s still spelt like that in French now, and look.

1:36 No B.

1:37 Now see how its spelling varied over the centuries afterwards.

1:41 Still no B through the 1300s, all throughout the 1400s, and the 1500s until oop!

1:47 What’s this?

1:48 Where did that come from?

1:51 Suddenly, in the middle of the 1500s a B appears.

1:56 What?

1:57 Why?

1:57 Well something else is happening at precisely this time.

2:01 The Renaissance.

2:03 The Renaissance in England sees scholars and the like

2:06 taking a sudden interest in ancient Greece and Rome.

2:09 It’s called the renaissance because it’s like a “rebirth” of classical culture.

2:13 One of the forms this takes for writers is an interest

2:16 in the Greek and particularly Latin origins of English words.

2:21 Some of these writers noticed, for example,

2:23 that the word “debt” most likely came from the Latin dēbitum, meaning “owed”.

2:29 And so, in a nod to debt’s classical roots,

2:32 and to show off that they were aware of them,

2:34 they started to spell debt with a B.

2:38 A pointless, self-congratulatory move that users of English like

2:42 you and me are still having to deal with.

2:45 But it gets worse.

2:46 The renaissance scholars did almost exactly the same thing

2:49 with the word “doubt” and they introduced that pretentious P in “receipt”.

2:53 They put a never-to-be-pronounced B in plumber, a mute C to indict,

2:58 a ludicrous L in salmon, and a stupidly silent S in isle.

3:04 All additional letters that hadn’t been present

3:06 in the words as long as they’d been in English.

3:09 That last one, isle,

3:11 had the knock-on effect of also introducing an S into the word: island.

3:15 because writers understandably thought the words were related,

3:18 which funnily enough, they’re not.

3:20 One of them is Germanic and the other one is Romance.

3:23 And bonus balls-up: this is all also responsible

3:26 for the S in the other kind of “aisle”, added to reflect “isle” too.

3:30 Also amazing is the fact that we’ve started to pronounce

3:33 some of the letters added during this silent revolution.

3:37 The word “perfect” didn’t have a C in it before the Renaissance.

3:41 And there was no L in fault, either.

3:44 But those fancy Renaissance writers shoehorned them

3:47 in and now we’re sounding them out.

3:50 So that is one of the more irritating

3:52 episodes in the story of silent letters in English.

3:55 It’s annoying because they don’t need to be there.

3:58 But it is not the only instance of deliberate insertion of inessential letters.

4:04 Another had occurred slightly earlier, actually,

4:06 when the first printing presses arrived in England.

4:10 I’ve told this story before but it bears repeating.

4:12 The fella who opened the first presses in England, William Caxton,

4:15 had to hire folk from continental Europe to help him with the things,

4:18 because the Europeans were the only ones with the expertise.

4:21 Unfortunately, the foreign printers that came over to Britain

4:24 had their own ideas about how English should, could and would be spelt.

4:29 For example, they thought that “could” should have an L

4:32 in it to match with the Ls in should and would,

4:36 despite “can’ being distinctly L-less.

4:40 So in some early printed books “could” appeared with an L.

4:44 And it stuck.

4:45 They also thought “thum”,

4:47 “crum” and “lim” should have silent Bs at the end of them,

4:50 like “comb”, “lamb” and “womb” already did.

4:54 So now they do.

4:55 And, consistent in their obsession with consistency,

4:58 they added a W to one of the meanings

5:01 of “hole” to match it up with “who”, “what” and “why”.

5:05 Although, actually that one’s kind of useful, isn’t it?

5:08 Oh, and they threw a spectral H into ghost because they had one in Flemish.

5:14 So again, we have a load of words

5:16 with letters in them that have never been pronounced.

5:20 They sit there.

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6:45 Now, a lot of the time,

6:47 that instinctive assumption that a silent letter in a word

6:50 was at some point in times-gone-by sounded out is correct.

6:54 Knock knock.

6:55 Who’s there?

6:56 Silent K.

6:57 In all of these words here.

6:59 Silent now, but not in the past.

7:02 It’s thought we stopped pronouncing the K

7:04 gradually over the centuries, funnily enough,

7:06 around the time when Renaissance scholars

7:07 were adding in those other silent letters.

7:10 But before that– for example,

7:11 in Geoffrey Chaucer’s day– the K was being proudly enunciated.

7:14 His knight’s tale would have been introduced with “A knyght ther was,

7:18 and that a worthy man”.

7:20 But if you go back further still to Old

7:23 English being spoken over a thousand years ago,

7:26 all of these words appear– although not with a K, but with C.

7:31 A C that was sounded out.

7:34 The C wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t because

7:36 these arrangements of Latin lettering

7:38 were supposed to represent Anglo-Saxon speech.

7:41 An Anglo-Saxon called a knife a cnif, a knot a cnotta and his knee his cnéo.

7:48 In Dutch and German, a knee is a “k-nee” to this day.

7:53 And you can just copy and paste everything I said

7:55 about silent K words over to these silent G words, too.

7:59 We once had g’nawing, g’nats and g’nomes.

8:03 Now, one word you could use to explain

8:05 the loss of these kuh and guh sounds is “laziness”.

8:09 The transitions to the Ns were kind of awkward, so we stopped doing them.

8:13 But another, more technical word to explain it is “phonotactics”.

8:19 Phonotactics dictate which sounds are allowed

8:21 to appear together in any given language.

8:24 For example, in English we can begin a word

8:27 with a “sp” sound combining an S and a P,

8:30 but we can’t begin it with a “hp” sound combining an H and a P.

8:35 However, phonotactics- these rules about the sounds

8:37 of a language- can change over time.

8:40 And that’s what’s happened with English.

8:42 KN and GN sounds were once on the right side of the law,

8:47 welcome at the start of English words.

8:49 But now the law’s changed and they’re not.

8:53 Phonotactics are responsible for many more silent letters in English.

8:57 Especially in words that we have imported from other languages.

9:00 Different languages have different rules and when

9:03 a borrowed word doesn’t fit with our sound laws,

9:06 we have to change that word to make it fit.

9:09 In ancient Greek it was perfectly legitimate to start a word with a “ps” sound.

9:13 But in English, it ain’t.

9:15 So we pretend the p isn’t there when

9:18 we pronounce Greek-derived words like “psychology” and “psalm”.

9:21 Ditto with “pt” words like “pterodactyl”.

9:25 However, the rules of English only say

9:27 that you can’t start a word with these sounds.

9:30 The “pter” at the start of pterodactyl- meaning “wing”- is

9:34 the same as the “pter” at the end of helicopter, meaning “wing”.

9:38 But because the “pt” is in the middle of that word, we can pronounce it.

9:43 Helicopter.

9:44 The same goes with words like “mnemonic”.

9:47 You can’t kick off an English word with “muh-nuh”.

9:50 You just can’t.

9:51 So we skip the M.

9:53 However, in other words, like” insomnia”, that “muh-nuh” sound is A-okay.

10:00 Or M-okay.

10:02 We have rules on how words can end, too.

10:04 No English term can climax with “mn” either, so in the case of “autumn”...

10:12 Good timing, tree.

10:13 So in the case of the word “autumn”, we drop that ungainly N.

10:17 Yet, with “autumnal”, both letters get their time to shine.

10:22 By the way, Chaucer used to spell autumn with a P in it too,

10:27 which is definitely just silly.

10:28 You can’t just P anywhere, Geoffrey.

10:30 Autumn of course isn’t a Greek word, by the way.

10:33 It’s from French– as are so very many of our English words.

10:36 Around a third of them, in fact.

10:38 Thanks William the Conqueror.

10:40 Another way you end up importing silent letters from other languages

10:43 is by borrowing words that already had silent letters in them.

10:47 Benign or malign, the French deigned to assign silent Gs

10:51 to words like reign and we’ve aligned with their design.

10:55 Most of those words were descended from Latin words where the G was pronounced.

11:00 Although, ironically, the silent G in “foreign” is a home-grown invention.

11:07 It was added by English writers inspired by the spelling of “sovereign”.

11:12 We can thank the French for the fact we can cross

11:13 off some of the trickier letters from our silent letter alphabet.

11:17 Borrowed terms like “faux pas” and “choux pastry” give our language its silent

11:23 Xs and we can casually discard Z with a “laissez-faire” “rendezvous” “chez” moi.

11:29 We can also thank French for words like ballet that allow us to cross off T too.

11:34 Although, listen: I hasten to add that “listen” and “hasten” have silent Ts too,

11:40 letters dropped as a result of centuries of accumulated laziness.

11:44 There’s no reason not to pronounce those Ts.

11:46 We still say “listed” and “hasty”.

11:48 But sometimes letters disappear for nothing more than convenience’s sake.

11:52 Take the silent Ds in “handkerchief” and “handsome”.

11:56 Although some people might pronounce the latter of those, just

12:00 like they might with the D in “sandwich”, although others definitely don’t.

12:05 Perhaps you saw Michael McIntyre’s recent,

12:07 brilliant reimagining of what English would sound

12:09 like if we did pronounce our silent letters.

12:12 “The sandwich shop is half a hour

12:16 away.” “It’s a waste of everybody’s time.” Although,

12:19 weirdly, I think I sometimes pronounce it “samwidge” as if there’s an M in it.

12:23 What’s that about?

12:25 Maybe you do too.

12:26 Try it.

12:27 Samwidge.

12:27 Samwidge.

12:29 Actually, all this raises a good point that I should have mentioned earlier:

12:32 what might be silent to one English speaker may be loud and proud to another.

12:37 So far as I’m concerned the Ls in “palm” and “folk” are silent.

12:42 You need them, because otherwise you’d have “pam” and “fok”,

12:45 but there’s no “luh” sound when I say them.

12:49 That was lost in most British varieties of English centuries ago.

12:53 But some people, particularly in the US, do pronounce those Ls.

12:58 And there are two parallel reasons for that.

13:02 Some folk retained the Ls because their dialect crossed

13:05 the Atlantic before the Brits decided to drop those Ls.

13:08 And other people are pronouncing them simply because they’re in the spelling,

13:13 unaware that they’re usually mute.

13:15 They’re essentially reintroducing them.

13:18 Good for them.

13:20 This kind of tomato-tomato difference between varieties of English

13:24 also governs the overall resonance of the letter R.

13:28 Some accents are overflowing with silent Rs, like mine.

13:32 I don’t pronounce the R in “over”, there’s no “ruh” sound.

13:37 Nor at the end of “paper” or “centre” or even in my own bloomin’ name:

13:42 To me, the second R in Robert is silent.

13:46 Robuht That’s because my accent is what’s called “non-rhotic”.

13:52 In “rhotic” accents though, like a lot of Americans have,

13:57 the Rs are not silent: Roberrt’s paperr coasterr.

14:01 You see?

14:02 For people with those English accents we have

14:04 to look a lot harder for silent Rs.

14:06 The folk at America’s Merriam-Webster dictionary propose “forecastle”-

14:10 part of a ship pronounced with typical nautical efficiency.

14:15 Or “February”.

14:17 Although a bet some people would challenge that second example.

14:20 I actually had to go out of my way there not to say “feb-roo-ary”.

14:23 Because I would say “feb-roo-ary” But people

14:26 definitely do say “feb-yoo-ree” so that’ll do.

14:28 Another letter that has the Merriam-Webster folk somewhat clutching

14:31 at straws in this, by the way excellent, article is F.

14:36 They put forward “fifth” as a word

14:38 with a silent F and I think they’re probably right.

14:41 Even the most precise among us who do say

14:44 “fif-th”– I think I do most of the time–

14:47 Still probably do find ourselves resorting to “fith”

14:50 when time and effort are of the essence.

14:53 Merriam-Webster actually gives that as one

14:55 of the legit pronunciations of the word.

14:57 [Robot voice]“Fifth” As do the folk at Oxford,

15:00 who’ve pop the second F in brackets to show that it is “optional”.

15:04 If fifth doesn’t satisfy the F out of you, what about the word “halfpenny”,

15:09 where the letter is definitely dropped even if it’s spelt like that.

15:14 But F is a tricky customer as are all of our remaining consonants above.

15:20 We’ll try to silence those shortly,

15:22 but first observe that all of our vowels still remain too.

15:27 So can each of those be mute?

15:30 Yes.

15:32 Take A out of “dead” and you’re still “ded”.

15:35 Filter out the Es from “sieve” and it’s still a “siv”.

15:38 When is I silent?

15:39 I be silent when I is in “business”.

15:42 Although weirdly the I in business seems to have stolen the U’s job instead.

15:47 Bizzness.

15:48 And business really does come from the idea of busy-ness, by the way.

15:52 And O and U can both be accounted for in the same notorious cluster:

15:56 the highly versatile word-ending OUGH.

16:00 We ignore the O in “enough”, but skip the U in “cough”.

16:05 English can be really silly.

16:09 So that is all five of those vowels swiftly dealt with.

16:12 They can all be silent in English.

16:15 A big reason why a lot of vowel sounds don’t

16:18 resemble their spellings is of course the famous Great Vowel Shift,

16:21 which saw the pronunciation of English long vowels change

16:25 pretty dramatically over just a couple of hundred years.

16:28 and their spelling simply didn’t always keep up.

16:31 I did a big video about that and I will leave a link below.

16:35 It’s a goody.

16:36 But now we’re left with the really tricky letters.

16:39 Now, to me, it makes sense to look at Y next,

16:43 it being a sort of part-time vowel.

16:45 Which English words have a silent Y.

16:52 Let’s see what the clever folk at Merriam-Webster went with.

16:56 “Beyond”?

16:57 So their logic is that if you take the Y out, you still get “be ond”.

17:04 But hold on– I definitely here a “yuh” sound in beyond.

17:09 Beyond.

17:10 It’s related to “yonder”, isn’t it?

17:12 Be-yond.

17:13 That Y might be superfluous, but it isn’t silent.

17:18 It’s only in “be ond’ because of the way English

17:22 speakers insert “yuh” sounds as they transition between certain vowel sounds.

17:26 “Be yond” It’s called the “intrusive Y”,

17:29 which sounds much spookier than it actually is.

17:32 So which words really do have a silent Y?

17:36 “Martyr” maybe?

17:38 Martyr.

17:40 There’s no obvious “yuh” sound in there,

17:42 but you do need it because you can’t just end a word with TR.

17:48 We’re back to phonotactics again.

17:50 I think martyr’s a maybe.

17:52 “Says” perhaps?

17:53 You definitely don’t pronounce the Y.

17:56 Not unless you’re being excessively precise, saying “say-s”.

17:59 But if you take it away you get “sas”, not “ses”.

18:06 So another maybe there, I reckon.

18:08 What about “they’re”?

18:11 I like to think I pronounce it “they-r” but I bet I

18:14 and a lot of people end up pronouncing it sometimes the same as these words.

18:19 Hence the common confusion between the three of them.

18:22 But is “they’re” really a word?

18:26 It’s more a smooshing together of two, isn’t it?

18:29 Gah.

18:30 At this rate we haven’t got a prayer of finding one… Hold on a second!

18:35 “Prayer” Prayer!

18:38 I mean, I guess some people pronounce it

18:41 “pray-er” but I bet they’re in the minority.

18:44 No, I think that’s it.

18:46 I’m having it.

18:47 Cross Y off that list.

18:48 “Prayer” is a word with a silent Y in it.

18:52 Okay, I’ve had a good old think, and a good old Google,

18:55 about J already and man, this one is tricky.

19:00 Not just because there appears to be only one silent J in the English language,

19:06 but because it's a word that I’m not even sure that I’m

19:09 allowed to utter without incurring the wrath of the YouTube gods.

19:15 Let’s risk it.

19:16 The word is “marijuana”.

19:19 Now obviously, in its native Spanish,

19:22 that J would be making a charismatic “huh” sound.

19:26 But in English it isn’t really doing anything.

19:30 Take it away and you get “mari uana”.

19:33 It certainly isn’t making its usual “juh” sound, or its occasional “yuh” sound.

19:39 So I reckon that does count.

19:42 Let’s chalk off J too.

19:44 Now, next in the queue is Q.

19:46 A letter that, let’s face it, we don’t really need.

19:50 But is it ever silent?

19:52 Well… how about in “racquet”?

19:56 Take it away, along with its parasitic U and you still get “rac-et”.

20:02 That’ll do, won’t it?

20:03 I know in the US “racquet” is now spelt like that, but so

20:07 far as I know you still spell the sport “racquetball” like that.

20:11 But if that still doesn’t satisfy you,

20:13 I offer up the word “lacquer” for the same reasons mentioned above.

20:17 So there we go: 25 out of 26 letters crossed off.

20:21 We’re close to knowing whether or not every letter

20:25 of the alphabet can indeed be silent in English.

20:29 It all comes down to V.

20:31 Well I have put every cell in my body into trying to find a word with a mute V,

20:37 and man, it is hard.

20:40 Merriam-Webster proposes “ne’er”, as in the poetic contraction of “never”.

20:46 But if you ever write ne’er, you do not write the V.

20:50 You pop an apostrophe there instead.

20:52 So the V is less silent, more completely absent.

20:56 Ditto with “e’er” and “o’er”.

20:59 And I guess you could throw “gimme” in the mix as well, for “give me”.

21:03 But it seems that we just can’t bring

21:06 ourselves to write a V where there isn’t one.

21:09 So that’s it.

21:10 I think V is the one letter in English that is ne’er silent.

21:15 Or, at least, I did conclude that.

21:17 But then, last night, while looking up whether this village in Devon is really

21:23 pronounced “woolzery”– it is by the way– I had a brainwave:

21:27 surely there’s a placename in England with a silent V in it.

21:32 If this can be pronounced “chumley”,

21:34 surely the inhabitants of somewhere else are

21:37 smuggling a cheeky V under the radar too.

21:39 Well, they are.

21:42 My enormous thanks to the people of this small village

21:44 in the English county of Norfolk for pronouncing their home “Raningum”.

21:50 Some people definitely pronounce it “Raveningham” too, but look.

21:53 Here’s that pronunciation confirmed in a 1990 BBC pronunciation dictionary.

22:00 This is “Raningum” Hall.

22:02 So are we allowing that?

22:04 Placenames are words, and this one’s in England.

22:07 So doesn’t that make it an English word?

22:09 I’m having it.

22:10 I’m doing it.

22:11 I’m crossing off that V.

22:12 And if one isn’t enough for you, how about the town of “Mul-guy” up in Scotland.

22:17 The name has its roots in Scottish Gaelic, but we call it that in English.

22:22 So that’s it!

22:23 Every letter can be silent somewhere in English.

22:27 Fight me in the comments if you disagree.

22:30 I’d also love to see your favourite

22:32 outrageous examples of the overuse of silent letters.

22:35 If you’ve enjoyed this video,

22:37 please do subscribe and click like to let the YouTube machines know.

22:40 And I think you should watch this video next.

22:44 For now, I’ll now leave you in silence.

22:50 [mystical noise]