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In US spellings, silent letters are sometimes omitted (e.g., acknowledgment / UK acknowledgement, ax / UK axe, catalog / UK catalogue, program / UK programme outside computer contexts), but not always (e.g., dialogue is the standard spelling in the US and the UK; dialog is regarded as a US variant; the spelling axe is also often used in the US).
Where the letter combination is described as "word-final", inflectional suffixes may be added without changing the pronunciation, e.g., catalogues. The dialects used are Received Pronunciation and General American. When pronunciations differ idiosyncratically, a pronunciation that only applies to one of the dialects is noted as being (RP) or (GA).
Letter combinations like wr for / r / and kn for / n / are technically also consonant digraphs, although they are so rare that they are sometimes considered patterns with "silent letters". Short vowel+consonant patterns involve the spelling of the sounds / k / as in peek, / dʒ / as in stage, and / tʃ / as in speech.
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
The kn and gn letter combinations usually indicate a Germanic origin of the word. In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic.
The reform removed inter-dialectal silent letters, ... In verb forms, some letters and letter combinations are pronounced differently from elsewhere. Letter(s)
It is considered a single letter, called għajn (the same word for eye and spring, named for the corresponding Arabic letter ʿayn). It is usually silent, but it is necessary to be included because it changes the pronunciation of neighbouring letters, usually lengthening the succeeding vowels.
Other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm include gh , gn , and gm . The digraph gu is sometimes used to indicate a hard g pronunciation before i e y (e.g. guess , guitar , Guinness ), including cases where e is silent (e.g., rogue , intrigue , catalogue , analogue ).