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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.
Most of these silent letters were pronounced for centuries then they became silent but the spelling was already fixed with these spellings, and now they show the history of the word.
The bad news is that more than 60% of English words have silent letters in them which can cause all sorts of problems with spelling the word or looking for it in a dictionary.
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).
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.
1. 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,
2. 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
3. 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 - click here ).
4. 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.
5. 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)
6. They show the origins and history (etymology) of a word.
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