Silent e

Common occurrence of "e" as a silent letter in English, like in "like" In English orthography, many words feature a silent ⟨e⟩ (single, final, non-syllabic, magic "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