Silent e

Article summary

In English orthography, many words feature a silent (single, final, non-syllabic, magic "e"), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English. In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift, the presence of a suffix on the end of a word influenced the development of the preceding vowel, and in a smaller number of cases it affected the pronunciation of a preceding consonant. When the inflection disappeared in speech, but remained as a historical remnant in the spelling, this silent was reinterpreted synchronically as a marker of the surviving sounds. This can be seen in the vowels in word-pairs such as rid and ride , in which the presence of the final, unpronounced appears to alter the sound of the preceding . An example with consonants is the word-pair loath (loʊθ) and loathe (loʊð), where the can be understood as a marker of a voiced .…

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