title_body: Can entire words be silent? Most people will be familiar with the idea that naturalistic spelling can be tricky. Some examples of natlangs with annoying spelling that come to mind are English (&quot;ough&quot; can be pronounced /ʌf/, /ɔf/, /ʌp/, /ow/, /u/, or /o/), French (&quot;Qu'est-ce qu'il mangent ?&quot; /kɛs kɪl mãʒ/), and Modern Greek (/i/ can be spelled &quot;η&quot;, &quot;ι&quot;, &quot;ει&quot;, &quot;υ&quot;, &quot;οι&quot;, or &quot;υι&quot;). But how bad can it get? Are completely silent words (that is, written but unpronounced) words attested in any language? I'm aware that Irish mutations developed from completely lost particles, but I don't think these particles are still written as separate words.
upvoted_answer: Dropping words happen (the ne of negation notoriously drops pretty systematically in spoken French) and commonly a that, as Gregory points out. However, I believer a true &quot;silent word&quot; is a nonsensical concept.
  For starters,  Silent letters are historical artifacts of a writing system. They are not a feature of the spoken language, so right there, a &quot;silent word&quot; cannot be something that happens in the spoken language unless the words in question are composed of phonemes or features that are merely difficult to hear from locutors of a different language. Still not silent in their native language. If a writer writes down a word, they typically do it with some sort of communicative intent (even if not consciously so).
  Second, in the spoken language, something that isn't pronounced in one way or another literally doesn't exist by definition (we can argue about stuff like sandhi and the side effects of sound change, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion IMO).
  So unless your language has a need to transcribe something that is literally not said (and we usually have punctuation and emoticons for that), then a &quot;silent word&quot; is, in my opinion, a self-contradicting concept.