English alphabet 24 letters of the Latin alphabet first (including ampersand), then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note "ond" (⁊), an insular symbol for "and": In the orthography of Modern English, thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete. Latin borrowings reintroduced homographs of ash and ethel into Middle English and Early Modern English, though they are largely obsolete (see "Ligatures in recent usage" below), and where they are used they are not considered to be separate letters (e.g. for collation purposes), but rather ligatures. Thorn and eth were both replaced by
Silent English alphabet Silent English alphabet A silent English alphabet is a list of English words, each containing a silent letter from A to Z. The term was coined by the linguist John Higgins who produced an early version of such a list in 1983. There are many reasons why English spelling has such a high usage of silent letters. English has been borrowing words when needed from more than 350 other languages. Some of those words had sounds not used in English, and the spelling was not always adapted to reflect this. An example is the sometimes-silent "t" in tsunami. After the