eli5: Why are there “silent letters” in words if they’re not meant to be pronounced? E.g. Why spell it “plumber” instead of “plummer”?

Question

This is true for a lot of words and I don’t understand what the point of including letters if they’re not supposed to be pronounced.

In: 6

Answer 1

They were pronounced in the language the words come from. If you see silent letters in a word, look at the etymology of the word and it will probably make sense.

In the case of plumber is comes from the old French word plummier, which doesn’t have the b in it, but the French word plummier actually comes from the Latin word plumbarius. So, during the renaissance when they realized the Latin origin word had a b in it, they added it to the written language but it wasn’t ever pronounced with the b in French, and both the written form and spoken form were carried over to English giving us a silent b.