English doesn't tolerate word-final -mb. It's always pronounced as -m, and the -b isn't pronounced when a suffix is added either.

Other examples: dumb, tomb, comb, womb, numb, thumb, catacomb, Coulomb. All of these have a silent B.

In most of these cases the final B is itself silent but elongates the previous wovel for me. "dumb" is pronounced longer than "dum", and it's the U that gets elongated. The difference is subtle, but my native tongue has "long wovels" so I'm trained to detect the difference.

That's true for the -omb words, but I've never heard anyone elongate the 'u' in any of the -umb words, at least not in Canadian English.

Paljon suomalaisia täällä?

Empiirisesti ehkä muutama tuhannesta.

Wait, what? None of those have a silent B, at least in my region. Are there places that pronounce the same as womb as "woom"?

Can I ask what region you live in? Pronouncing <womb> as /wuːm/ is the dominant pronunciation in every English speaking country, so much so that I can't recall ever hearing it differently, and I'm surprised you've never heard it. It's not a recent change either, the /b/ disappeared somewhere before the 14th century.

New England. I've never paid enough attention when traveling to notice (those words aren't exactly the most common to hear), but when I say "woom" my lips end closed, and when I say "womb" my lips end opened after closing. The b isn't "voiced", per se, but it does change the way the word sounds to me.

And to be fair, I am aware New England English is its own distinct thing so I might have grown up in a bubble:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_English

NE Ohio and I always pronounced the b too (akin to New England I guess)

The "b"

I had the same question :D from other comments, it seems a bit controversial, no?

Another one I, as a non native speaker, find odd, is "iron". People just say it as "ion", dropping the 'r', right?? At least that's what I hear.

I oddly discovered this as well (not something I thought about) when watching a playthrough video for a boardgame (Brass: Birmingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzxf4tfq9as ). In there, he says "iron" as it should be said given the letters in the word. My wife and I are somewhat working to actually say the word that way now.

The 'r' and 'o' are transposed: it's pronounced 'iorn.'

According to this[1], that's only in the USA... British English appears to drop the 'r' entirely (that's why I never hear it as I've lived in Europe and Australia)... and the American pronounciation seems so odd, is there any other word where the 'r' and the vowel are swapped like that? I know only one in British/Australian with "centre" being pronounced "center", but can't think of any others.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/iron

> British English appears to drop the 'r' entirely

Yeah, but the Brits make up for that by stuffing a lot of extraneous 'r's in between other words.

(TBF, that's a kind of sensible simplification of pronunciation: it's used when one word ends and the next starts with a wovel, to ease the transition.)

> I'm confused. Which letter is silent in "plumber"?

I was taught it's pronounced "plummer". So, the 'b'.