The h may or may not be silent in such cases. Word list activities: Silent h words. Start here for a quick overview of the site
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It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater ('theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with th even after the last German spelling reform. messiah from site design / logo © 2020 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under First, let me note that some people use “an” as the indefinite article form before “historic”, “horrific”, “hotel” and a couple more words beginning with an “H”, so they say “an istoric” rather than “a historic”. I have only ever said human, pronouncing the h…. For your two examples, they are both borrowings from foreign languages and spellings are decided on arbitrarily, sometimes based on the original spelling (as in the case of German) or by accepted correspondence between the writing of the original language and English (or sometimes someone just makes it up and it sticks).Since the 'th' sound is rare in all the languages of the world, and English is one of the few with that sound, the rule of thumb for you would be, if reading English, if you see a 'th' spelling, Additionally, there is no rule to determine whether There are few rules to identify a word with silent H.To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader.
The best answers are voted up and rise to the top Over the centuries we have come to pronounce the h in words like horrible, hospital, host, human, and humour. It only takes a minute to sign up.When is 'h' silent and when is it not?
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This creates a challenge for English speakers. Vehicle .
The words you mention are derived from French. The u makes a yoo sound. as the word. However, virtually all speakers Since these words do not begin with a vowel, the rule prescribing the “an” form Nevertheless, pronunciation of words like “historic” is not what I want to write about in this article. (e.g.
French still have a silent h, however.
Usually they turn out to borrowings from French, like 'honest'But your examples seem to be about 'th'. Silent H H is always silent in HONOUR, HOUR, HONEST, HEIR, VEHICLE & VEHEMENT.