Silent e

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 phonics education, where a silent ⟨e⟩ which has this effect is sometimes called a magic, sneaky, or bossy ⟨e⟩. Orthographic linguist Gina Cooke uses the term replaceable ⟨e⟩ since replaceability is the consistent mark of the single final non-syllabic ⟨e⟩, and its 'silence' differs from other 'silent' letters' functions. Some practitioners of Structured Word Inquiry have adopted that terminology.