Silent letter

A silent letter is a written letter that is not pronounced in a particular word. Its presence often reflects the word’s history or a spelling convention.

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History of English spelling: The development of English writing conventions from early inscriptions to modern standardized spelling. English spelling retained many letters after their sounds disappeared or pronunciations changed.
Phoneme: A phoneme is a speech sound that distinguishes words within a language. A silent letter has no corresponding phoneme in the word’s pronunciation.
Silent k: Silent k is the unpronounced initial k in words such as “knight” and “knee.” The k in “knight” illustrates a letter once pronounced but now silent.
Digraph: A digraph is a pair of letters that represents a single sound, as “sh” does in “ship.” A digraph’s letters jointly represent a sound, unlike a letter with no pronounced value.
Great Vowel Shift: A series of major changes in the pronunciation of English long vowels between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Pronunciation changed while many inherited spellings stayed fixed.
Grapheme: A grapheme is a written unit that represents a speech sound or other linguistic information. Silent letters are written units that do not represent a pronounced sound in a given word.
Silent b: Silent b is an unpronounced b found in words such as “lamb” and “debt.” The b appears in different positions and has different historical explanations across words.
Diphthong: A diphthong is a vowel sound that glides from one vowel quality to another within one syllable. Two written vowels can represent one moving sound rather than include a silent letter.
Middle English: The forms of English spoken and written roughly from the late eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Some modern silent letters were pronounced in Middle English.
Orthography: Orthography is the conventional system for writing a language, including its spelling and punctuation rules. Silent letters belong to the relationship between conventional spelling and speech.