- 3-minute read
- 2nd December 2017
Spelling Tips: Silent Letter Errors
‘Shhh!’ said the letter N to the letter K. ‘Don’t make a sound. If the humans can’t hear you, they’ll never know you’re here at the start of “knickers”. And they can’t spell you if they can’t find you!’
(Photo: Πελοποννησιακό Λαογραφικό Ίδρυμα)
That is the story of why ‘knickers’ is tricky to spell. But it gets worse! There are silent letters in lots of English words, and it’s not just ‘K’ you have to worry about. To help out, then, we’ve prepared a guide to avoiding silent letter errors.
Why Are Some Letters Silent?
Are they just shy? Not quite. It’s more to do with the history of words. Lots of English terms come from other languages, but their pronunciations have changed over time.
The ‘kn’ in words like ‘knickers’, ‘knight’ and ‘know’ has roots in Germanic languages. ‘Knickers’, for example, can be traced back to the Dutch knikken, where the ‘k’ sound is still pronounced.
Over time, in English, the ‘k’ sound was dropped from these words but kept in the spelling. Sometimes, such as with ‘knight’ and ‘night’, keeping the silent letter even helps us tell them apart from other terms. But in other cases, it just makes spelling harder! As such, you need to look out for silent letters.
Find this useful?
Subscribe to our newsletter and get writing tips from our editors straight to your inbox.
Common Silent Letter Combinations
There are too many words with silent letter for us to list them all here. But we can point out a few common silent letter combinations so that you’ll know what to look for. For instance:
- ‘B’ after ‘m’ or before ‘t’ (e.g. ‘bomb’ or ‘debt’)
- ‘G’ before ‘n’ (e.g. ‘gnaw’ or ‘sign’)
- ‘K’ before ‘n’ (e.g. ‘knit’ or ‘knuckle’)
- ‘N’ after ‘m’ (e.g. ‘hymn’ or ‘autumn’)
- ‘P’ is often silent before ‘s’, ‘t’ and ‘n’ (e.g. ‘psychology’, ‘receipt’ or ‘pneumonia’)
- ‘T’ after ‘s’ in the middle of some words (e.g. ‘listen’ or ‘castle’)
- ‘W’ before ‘r’ (e.g. ‘write’ or ‘awry’)
There are also words that don’t fit the patterns above, like ‘sword’ (where the ‘w’ is silent) and ‘phlegm’ (where the ‘g’ is silent), so it’s worth checking any term you’re not sure about.
And don’t worry too much over how a word is pronounced when writing. After all, as long as you get it right on paper, your reader won’t know whether you’re saying it correctly!