Enjoy :) Copyright © 2020 Macmillan Holdings, LLC. wreak foreign A better answer is to say that the SC in “science“ makes an S sound, like the phoneme /s/. scissors glisten wry, * Note: These words can be pronounced with or without the silent letter /t/ resign If the SC word is new enough and wasn’t around when Old English was spoken, then the C is there for a very different reason. psychotic Learn this spelling list using the 'Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check' activity. echo technology, knack wrung Students guess the word and spell it to their partner. But as you can see, this letter combination can vary depending on the history of each word — as do many letter combinations found in the English language. debt whistle Press the ‘Proceed to Checkout’ Button jostle wrath If you are a staff member or student of HKUST login here: If you are NOT a staff member or student of HKUST login here: Many words in English have silent letters. sword descent ascend Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. It is indeed FAS C INATING that the letter ‘c’ is not always pronounced in the combination SC, giving us S C INTILLATING words like S C ISSORS, AS C END, DIS C ERN, MUS C LE and S C IENCE. So yes, the C of SC is what we usually call a “silent letter” in the case of words like "science" and "scent,” but there’s more to the story once you look into the history of English words. guilt knew ▲, "I ran the trial with a small group of students over three weeks before the summer holidays," she says. monochrome scissors, handkerchief chemist wrestle sign, ache build English Words with Silent C freebie : This resource offers two words charts. And "porpoise" which literally means “pig fish”comes from “porcus,” the origin of "pork," plus “piscis,” the origin of "fish.". thumb If they’re old enough to have been around in Old English, they were probably pronounced like our modern SH-words: "shin" was spelled S-C-I-N, and a "sheath" for your sword would be spelled S-C-E-A-T-H. Every now and then, some of them kept their C’s but also sound like SH-words now: “omnscience” and “prescient,” or sometimes they sound like CH: “conscience” and “conscious.” A few added an H after the SC and made it just sound like SK: “schizophrenia” and “schism.” And a very few words make it sound just like S: “science,” “rescind,” “descent,” and the Massachusetts coastal town called “Scituate.”, Every now and then, you get a group of words where you can see quite a bit of variation: "fish" and "pisces" both came from a root related to Latin “piscis” (which is spelled with an SC in the middle) "Pescatarian" comes from the same root. wriggle mechanical guile wring Many words in English have silent letters. monarch descent orchid A silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word’s pronunciation. knot Silent C Words. * This sentence was added by a Spellzone user.