The (middle) sound of "silence"

SCHWA

Think of the unstressed vowel sound in "about" or "banana" that’s often written as an upside-down "e."

This clue plays with the word "silence" by focusing on its middle sound. When you say "silence" out loud, the middle syllable is a soft "uh" sound—that’s the schwa, the most common vowel sound in English. It’s often represented by an upside-down "e" in phonetics and appears in unstressed syllables, like the "a" in "about." The clue cleverly hints at the sound itself rather than spelling.