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

Usually silent letters are left over from an era when those letters were pronounced. If you read Chaucer, every letter in “knighte” (which is how he spelled “knight”) is pronounced. Scribes kept that same spelling even after people stopped pronouncing all the letters. The same is true of plumb, numb, and dumb, where people stopped pronouncing the “b” but the spelling remained the same.