‘Miscellaneous’ – pronounced ‘mis- sell- lay – nee – ous’.‘Muscle’ – we say the same as ‘mussel’, the seafood.However, when following an ‘s’ it is often silent. In English we say ‘re-seet’, with no ‘p’ sounding in the second syllable, though some would argue that the p is there to slightly soften the sound.Ī bit like the ‘k’, the ‘c’ is usually a hard sound (unless followed by an ‘h’ ‘ch’ is soft, think ‘cheese’, ‘cheers’). ‘Pneumonia’ – caused when you catch excessive cold – also has a silent p, so it is pronounced ‘new-moan-ee-a’.įinally, you’ll every now and then find a silent p in the middle of a word, such as ‘receipt’.

Indeed, when p or ‘ps’ starts a word it is almost always medical. Most of these words with silent ‘p’s are to do with the mind or the medicine of the mind: Psychology, psychiatry, psyche, psychological, psychotic or pseudo. The ‘p’, usually a popping sound made at the front of the mouth, is silenced when it precedes an ‘s’. Here’s a few words which have a silent k at the start and a hard k later on: knock, knack, knapsack, knickers, knuckle. Know’ is interesting, because even though the ‘k’ is silent (we don’t say ‘cah-noh’), it is not pronounced the same way as ‘now’. However, when the letter ‘k’ precedes the letter ‘n’ at the start of a word, it falls silent such as ‘know’. The ‘k’ in English is traditionally a hard-sounding vowel ‘cah’ or ‘kah’, especially when it’s at the end of a word: back, for instance. Here we take a look at some common words with silent letters, and how to pronounce them. Thanks to this development of the language, we are now left with hundreds and hundreds of English words which have some surprising silent letters.

Words with letter m