--- title: Silent letters and the mystery of -ough — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Silent letters and the mystery of -ough», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: A silent letter is written but not said, like the k in knee or the b in lamb; most of them are fossils of sounds people really sa --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Silent letters and the mystery of -ough # Silent letters and the mystery of -ough Lesson 13 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/0/) — A silent letter is written but not said, like the k in knee or the b in lamb; most of them are fossils of sounds people really said hundreds of years ago, before the sounds wore away and the spelling stayed. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/2/) — A few silent letters were never spoken at all: scholars in the 1500s pushed an s into island and a b into debt and doubt to make them look like Latin or French words. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/3/) — The letters -ough are the champions of chaos: though, through, tough, cough, bough and thought all say -ough differently, because old sounds changed in different ways in different words. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/4/) — Names keep their spelling while speech shortens them: Wednesday (from Woden's day) has a silent d, and Worcestershire is said "WUSS-ter-sher"; for place names, listen to the locals. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/5/) — A silent letter is a letter you write but don't say. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/6/) — Middle English is English from about 1100 to 1500; in it the k in knight was said, and gh was a throaty sound like the ch in Scottish "loch". - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/7/) — In Old English, knee was cnēow and was said with a k; people stopped saying the k at the start of words around the 1600s; German Knie still has a spoken k. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/8/) — Island came from Old English "īegland" with no s; in the 1500s people wrongly linked it to French "isle" and Latin "insula" and added an s that was never spoken. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/9/) — Debt came from French "dette"; scholars added a b to show its Latin family (debitum), and doubt got its b the same way; the b was never spoken in English. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/10/) — -ough has several sounds: though (like go), through (like true), tough (like stuff), cough (like off), bough (like cow), thought (like taught). - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/11/) — A bough is a big branch of a tree. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/12/) — Wednesday comes from "Woden's day", after the old Germanic god Woden, the same god the Norse called Odin. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/14/) — The w in write, wrong, wrist and wreck was said in Old English and dropped away before r; in water it stands before a vowel, so it stayed. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/15/) — Worcestershire is said "WUSS-ter-sher", Leicester "LES-ter" and Gloucester "GLOS-ter". - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/16/) — Colonel is said "kernel": it was first said from French "coronel" with an r, and the spelling was later changed to look like Italian "colonnello". - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/13-silent-letters-and-the-mystery-of-ough/17/) — "Ghoti" is a famous joke spelling of fish (gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation); real English never uses those letters that way at the start or end of a word, so it is a joke, not a rule. - ← previous: [Spelling traps: their, there, they're and friends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/12-spelling-traps-their-there-theyre/) - next →: [Punctuation that changes meaning](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/14-punctuation-that-changes-meaning/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)