In English orthography, the letter ⟨k⟩ normally reflects the pronunciation of and the letter ⟨g⟩ normally is pronounced or "hard", as in goose, gargoyle and game; or "soft", generally before or, as in giant, ginger and geology; or in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre. However, silent ⟨k⟩ and ⟨g⟩ occur because of apheresis, the dropping of the initial sound ofa word. These sounds used to be pronounced in Old and Middle English.
Silent (k)
The letter ⟨k⟩ is normally silent when it precedes an ⟨n⟩ at the beginning of a word, as in “knife”, and sometimes by extension in other positions. Exceptions include the town of Knoebels Grove located in Pennsylvania in the United States, the Germanic surname Knaus used by NASCARcrew chiefChad Knaus and First Lady Melania Trump and also words of foreign origin such as Knesset, the name of the Israeli Parliament, knish, etc. A silent also occurs in the digraph, as in “tick”, “flick”, “nickel”, usually preceded by a short vowel. In words such as “nickel” and “rocket”, the combination is an indication that the preceding vowel is a short vowel, and the following is pronounced. In the past more words had the combination, such as “intrinsick ”, but many of these are now obsolete, replaced with.
Silent (g)
While not as common, the letter ⟨g⟩ is also usually silent when preceding an ⟨n⟩ at the beginning or end of a word, as in “gnat”, “campaign” and “design”. In some words borrowed from Romance languages, it may appear within a word, as in “champagne”, where it originally denoted the phoneme ŋ. An exception is the acronym GNU. In addition, the digraph, in the dominant dialects of modern English, is almost always either silent or pronounced . It is also occasionally pronounced, such as in Edinburgh. When ⟨gh⟩ occurs at the beginning of a word, it is pronounced hard as in “ghost” and “ghetto”, but also "Afghanistan". In a few words of Greek origin, digraph ⟨gm⟩ is pronounced, with the being silent, such as in “phlegm”, “paradigm” and "diaphragm".
Etymology
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. For example, the initial ⟨k⟩ is not silent in words such as German' which is a cognate of ', ' which is a cognate of ', etc. Likewise, ⟨g⟩ was probably a voiced velar plosive and the initial ⟨g⟩ was not silent: for example, German, a cognate of,, a cognate of, etc.
Examples
Following is a list of words that include a silent ⟨k⟩ or ⟨g⟩. Plural nouns, as well as compound nouns derived from and containing simple nouns in the list are ignored. For verbs, only the infinitive form of the verb is given, not any conjugations or derived verbs:
