Many years ago, while teaching ESL in Argentina, I came across a lighthearted, illustrated book about the history of the English language. As a teacher, I’m always looking for ways to keep students engaged, especially when we’re ploughing through grammar rules, pronunciation drills, or vocabulary lists. And this book provided material that was often a welcome, entertaining detour from the usual classroom routine.
I still remember a few passages that tackled one of the trickier parts of learning English as a second language: the silent “e.” The book claimed (perhaps you’ve heard this too) that Dutch printers, unfamiliar with English and paid by the letter, added extra “e”s (and even the silent “ght” in words like night and light) to boost their pay.
It’s a fun story. However reflecting upon it today I find it a bit dubious. So I looked into it.
Could something as silly and simple as greedy Dutch printers explain why so many “e’s” in English are not pronounced?
Frankly, the evidence I found for this claim is weak and the story almost certainly purely anecdotal. Many silent “e’s” actually predate the printing press, and most linguists treat the silent “e” as the result of morphological remnants (leftover endings from older versions of English), phonetic change (sounds in words shifted but spelling didn’t), and orthographic conservation (spelling habits that resist change even when pronunciation evolves) rather than any kind of rudimentary economic incentive.
Long before the printing press was invented English was already full of unpronounced “e’s”. Old English, spoken a thousand years ago, had a very different sound system, In other words, printers didn’t add the silent “e”; they mostly kept what was already there.
Old English, spoken roughly between the 5th and 11th centuries, had a very different sound system from modern English, and over the centuries, English pronunciation changed much faster than its spelling did. By the time the first printing presses arrived in England in the late 1400s, many words already contained “e’s” that were no longer clearly pronounced. Words like name and stone had once sounded more like nah-muh and stoh-nuh.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English absorbed thousands of Anglo-Norman (French) words, many of which brought new spelling patterns and endings, some which later became silent. For instance, the silent final -e survived in many French-derived words such as large, nice, and justice.
By the time printing took hold in England, silent “e’s” were already well established in English writing.1
It wasn’t just in French-derived words that the silent “e” survived. Some silent “e’s” also reflect older grammatical endings that dropped out of speech but remained in writing. In Old and Middle English, an “-e” could mark grammatical case, gender, or number, much like endings still do in modern German. For example, stone in Old English was stān (singular), but in Middle English you might find ston(e) for the singular and ston-es for the plural. When those endings disappeared from everyday pronunciation, the final -e often remained as a remnant of an earlier grammar that once made complete sense.2
A second reason for the silent “e” lies in the way English sounds evolved after the Middle Ages. Around the 15th and 16th centuries, English underwent a dramatic shift in vowel pronunciation known as the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a long, drawn out process where many the pronunciation of English vowels “moved up” in the mouth. Words that once had a short or clearly pronounced final vowel gradually lost it.
For example, name was once pronounced something like “NAH-meh,” and hope like “HOH-peh.” Over time, speakers stopped voicing the last syllable, but the spelling never caught up. Rather than rewrite thousands of familiar words, printers and scholars simply kept the old forms, leaving the “e” in place in written English even though it could no longer be heard in everyday speech.
Finally, some silent e’s survived simply because English spelling has tended to resist change. Once a spelling becomes familiar, people are reluctant to alter it, even when pronunciation shifts. This habit of preserving old spellings is known as orthographic conservation.
By the time pronunciation had changed dramatically (especially after the Great Vowel Shift), the spelling of most words had already become standardized through printed books and early dictionaries.Writers and printers valued consistency more than phonetic accuracy, and the silent e, by then long unspoken, was left untouched.
In this way, one can see how English spelling can act as a ‘museum’ of sorts offering insight into how the English language developed over the centuries. And the silent e is one of the clearest exhibits of a language that has undergone significant changes since ‘Sēo sunne scīnð brīht’ meant ‘The sun shines bright’ in Old English.3
As entertaining as myths like the “greedy Dutch printers” story can be in class, as teachers we are well aware that accuracy matters more than legend, especially for those of us tying to help students make sense of English’s many quirks. The truth behind the silent e is far more interesting than a printer’s paycheck: its origins offers us a view of English as it was with all the cultural and historical implications.
So while an ESL student may puzzle over why that final letter remains, as teachers we should not emulate the letter “e” and remain silent, but remind students that English has evolved through centuries of change, each change leaving a small but important mark on how we write it, how we speak it, and how we understand its history and its people.
Now for your amusement a quiz on the historical origins of some common English words that end in a silent “e.”
NOTES
- Printing was introduced to England by William Caxton, who had learned the trade in Bruges — a Dutch-speaking region. This connection may explain how the myth of “Dutch printers adding extra letters” took hold, though there’s no real evidence for it. 🔙 Return to post
- These leftover endings help explain why English spelling can feel inconsistent: it still carries traces of the more heavily inflected grammar of its past (that is, a grammar where word endings changed form to show things like gender, number, or grammatical role). For example, in Middle English the adjective “white” could appear as “whit(e)” when modifying certain nouns, showing how a final -e sometimes reflected grammatical agreement. When those endings disappeared from speech, that final -e stayed behind in writing, a relic of an older, more flexible system. 🔙 Return to post
- Even later efforts at spelling reform, such as those proposed in the 18th and 19th centuries, rarely touched the silent e, since it was already serving other useful roles such as indicating a long vowel (as in rate vs. rat) or softening the sound of a preceding consonant (as in dance or change). 🔙 Return to post