Silent means making no sound at all: not quiet, not soft, nothing. A house at four in the morning, a phone switched to silent in a meeting, a room that goes silent when the wrong person walks in.
People are silent when they choose not to speak, as in he stayed silent throughout the interview. A document can be silent too, and a law or a contract is silent on a subject when it says nothing about it; that use is worth having. Letters are silent as well, and English is full of them: the k in knee, the b in doubt, the p in receipt. Films made before sound arrived are silent films, and the silent treatment is what you get from someone too angry to speak to you. The noun is silence and the adverb silently, while a silent partner in a business is one who puts in money and stays out of the running of it.
1adjectivesilentMaking no sound.~31%
“The house was silent except for the clock in the hall.”
synonyms: soundless, noiseless
2adjectivespeakingNot speaking, or saying nothing about a particular subject.~24%
“He remained silent when the police asked where he had been.”
3adjectiveletterOf a letter: written but not pronounced.~2%
“The w in wrist is silent.”
4adjectivefilmOf a film: made without recorded sound.~43%
“She collects silent films from the 1920s.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Silent is Latin silēns, the present participle of sileō, to be silent. Behind it stands a Proto-Indo-European root seyl-, meaning still, windless and slow. Silence was imagined first as air that has stopped moving.
Proto-Indo-European
*seyl- — still, windless, quiet, slow
Latin
silēns — silent
English, today
silent
Built from
From Latin silēns (“silent”), present participle of sileō (“be silent”), from Proto-Indo-European seyl- (“still, windless, quiet, slow”). Related to Gothic 𐌰𐌽𐌰𐍃𐌹𐌻𐌰𐌽 (“to cease, grow still, be silent”), Old English sālnes (“silence”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA