English, a silent language
Lots of letters can be silent in English, but I’m missing a few. Can anyone help fill in the rest of this table? Proper nouns are cheating. So is “February.”
Edit: words in italics were found by minorninth at this page. To be honest, though, I’d like better ones for Q and Y.
- A – boat
- B – numb
- C – scissors
- D – adjective
- E – made
- F –
- G – gnaw
- H – through
- I – piece
- J –
- K -knew
- L – talk
- M – mnemonic
- N – damn
- O – leopard
- P – psychic
- Q – lacquer
- R –
- S – island
- T – often
- U – fugue
- V –
- W – who
- X – faux
- Y – prayer
- Z – rendezvous
I found a site that contains at least one answer for every letter of the alphabet: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5037/srabs1.html –
though I don’t agree with all of its answers.
I don’t like the answers for F or R, and it doesn’t have entries fo J or V, but the rest have words I’ll accept. Thanks for the link!
Is the t really silent in often? I think that I hear it sometimes and may even say it sometimes. If we need others, there’s filet, ballet, and probably more that aren’t coming to the front of my mind right now.
Amazingly, the dictionary seems to agree with you on “adjective” and “prayer” (despite the fact that that isn’t how I pronounce them.. I would pronounce “ajective” or prer differently). Their definitions on “often” have it with and without the ‘t’. They also have 3 for “fifth” – fith, fift, and fifth. So I guess that’s an F example.
(I used http://m-w.com/)
Oh, I also think that scissors is a little arbitrary. You can’t tell which one is the silent letter…