Crossword Dictionary
Kiln
Kiln, a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects made from clay into pottery, tiles and bricks. Various industries use rotary kilns for pyroprocessing—to calcinate ores, to calcinate limestone to lime for cement, and to transform many other materials.
Kiln descends from the Old English cylene, which was borrowed from Old Welsh 'Cylyn' which was in turn borrowed from the Latin culīna, kitchen, cooking-stove, burning-place. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, kiln was spelt as cyline, cylene, cyln(e) in Old English. In Middle English as kulne, kyllne, kilne, kiln, kylle, kyll, kil, kill, keele, kiele. In Middle English the final "n" had become silent in most areas, resulting in the "kill" spelling instead of the etymological kiln.
In the 14th century, Middle English speakers began to pronounce "kiln" as "kil" with the "n" silent. In James A. Bowen's book English Words as Spoken and Written for Upper Grades (1900), he points out that “kiln†contains the digraph “ln,†a combination of two letters that make one sound: “The digraph ln, n silent, occurs in kiln. A fall down the kiln can kill you.†Bowen noted that “kill†and “kiln†are homophones.
The modern pronunciation of this word, where the "n" is pronounced, has become widely used. This is due to a phenomenon known as spelling pronunciation, where the assumed pronunciation of a word is surmised from its spelling and differs from its actual pronunciation. This is common in words with silent letters.