Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 156th episode.

I've just created a new lesson on pronunciation that lists all of the words in the top 5,000

most frequent words that have a silent consonant. I didn't include silent vowels because their

spelling rules are so complicated that they are very difficult to classify as being silent or not.

The top 5,000 most frequent words is not just an arbitrary number.

That is a number of words listed in Mark Davies and D Gardner's Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary English.

I've talked about the frequency dictionary before,

but in case you don't know what it is,

it's basically just a list of words that includes information

about the part of speech that the word is being used

as well as how frequently the word is used in English.

This frequency dictionary also lists other words that are usually as well as how frequently the word is used in English.

This frequency dictionary also lists other words that are usually used alongside each word.

To get an idea of how important the 5,000 most frequent words are in English, it states in the preface of the Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary

English that, quote, the 4,000 to 5,000 most frequent words account for up to 95% of a written

text, and the top 1,000 most frequent words account for 85% of speech. So, if you can handle the top

5,000 words in English, you'll do quite well in most any situation. I never would have guessed that the

letters L, B, and G are the most common silent consonants in the top

2,000 words in English. Those are the words I'm going to talk about today. In fact, there are 13 words

in the top 2,000 most frequent words in English that have silent consonants.

Seven of those words have a silent L, four have a silent B, and two have a silent G.

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