Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

silence

UK/ˈsaɪlən(t)s/US/ˈsaɪlən(t)s/
nounB14 meaningsVery common — you will meet it every day · #1,282 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: silenced, silencing, silences

Silence is the absence of sound. The moment after the last note dies away, a house at three in the morning, the gap when nobody at the table knows what to say next.

It is an uncountable noun in most phrases: total silence, sitting in silence, silence fell. But you can count particular ones, and English does it all the time: an awkward silence, a long silence, a minute's silence for the dead. There is a verb too. To silence someone is to stop them speaking, and it carries force with it: the guns were silenced, the critics were silenced. A silencer is the part fitted to quieten a gun or an exhaust. The word also carries moral weight, because your silence on a subject can be read as agreement, or as cowardice, and people will read it either way without asking.

Anonymous (Faras)Unknown author · Public domain

Definitions of silence

  1. 1nounsilenceComplete absence of sound.B1~27%

    “The hall fell into complete silence when the lights went down.”

    synonyms: quiet, stillness, hush

  2. 2nounperiodA period in which nobody speaks.B1~36%

    “There was a long silence before he answered.”

  3. 3nounrefusalA refusal or failure to speak about something.B2~35%

    “Her silence on the whole affair was taken as agreement.”

  4. 4verbstopTo stop someone speaking, or to stop something making noise.B2~2%

    “The new law was used to silence the loudest critics.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 11 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

silence is an absence of sound.

Also accepted in games: quiet

Where it comes from

Silence came through Old French from Latin silentium, built on silēns, the participle meaning being quiet. It pushed aside the native English word swīġe, which had done the same job for centuries. English has a habit of doing this: the Latin word arrives with the courts and the church, and the old one quietly goes.

  1. Latin

    silentium — silence

  2. Old French

    silence

  3. Middle English

    silence

  4. English, today

    silence

From Middle English silence, from Old French silence, from Latin silentium (“silence”), from silēns + -ium. Displaced native swīġe and sālnes.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in News & Communication, A Man Called Ove, Sounds & Noises

First appears in chapter 1 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

silence in the wild

  • While most historical approaches rely on what an author's works contain, an argument from silence relies on what the book or document does not contain.

    Argument from silence

  • Many prior musical pieces were largely composed of silence, and silence played a notable role in his prior work, including Sonatas and Interludes.

    4′33″

  • Sub silentio is a legal Latin term meaning "under silence" or "in silence".

    Sub silentio

  • "What was done cannot be undone, but we can end the silence," he said.

    Tuskegee Syphilis Study

  • The Members then stood in silence, an honor usually reserved for the death of a Monarch.

    Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.