Silent e

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In English orthography, many words feature a silent ⟨e⟩ (single, final, non-syllabic ‘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 ⟨e⟩ was reinterpreted synchronically as a marker of the surviving sounds.

This can be seen in the vowels in word-pairs such as rid /rɪd/ and ride /raɪd/, in which the presence of the final, unpronounced ⟨e⟩ appears to alter the sound of the preceding ⟨i⟩. An example with consonants is the word-pair loath (loʊθ) and loathe (loʊð), where the ⟨e⟩ can be understood as a marker of a voiced ⟨th⟩.

As a result of this reinterpretation, the ⟨e⟩ was added by analogy in Early Modern English to many words which had never had a pronounced ⟨e⟩-inflection, and it is used in modern neologisms such as bike, in which there is no historical reason for the presence of the ⟨e⟩, because of a perceived synchronic need to mark the pronunciation of the preceding vowel.

Although Modern English orthography is not entirely consistent here, the correlation is common enough to allow a rule-of-thumb to be used to explain the spelling, especially in early schooling, where a silent ⟨e⟩ which has this effect is sometimes called a magic ⟨e⟩ or bossy ⟨e⟩. Orthographic linguist Gina Cooke uses the term replaceable ⟨e⟩^[1] since the replaceability is the consistent mark of the single final nonsyllabic ⟨e⟩, and its 'silence' differs from other 'silent' letters' functions. Some practitioners of Structured Word Inquiry have adopted that terminology.^[2]