Spelling: Final Silent E

As a general rule, the e on the end of a word is silent: the word ends with the sound of the second-last letter. The e is important to the word because it makes the first vowel long. If you accidentally leave the e off, the first vowel becomes short, and it changes the meaning or the tense of the word.

The monkey bit me.

Keep fingers out of the cage: the monkeys bite.

By adding the e to the end of bit, the word is changed from past to present tense.

Don’t cut yourself on the sharp knives.

The kitten is really cute.

In this case, the silent e creates a completely different word.

When adding a suffix, the silent e is usually dropped from the end of the root word: there shouldn’t be two e’s together.

That store is great: it has lots of different cheeses.

The dog bared his teeth at the mailman.

The baby’s eyes were the bluest blue eyes ever seen.