mute

Mute comes from Middle English muet, borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Middle French muet/moet, built from mu ("dumb, mute") plus the suffix -et. Its spelling was later reshaped to match the Latin word mūtus, giving us the modern form.

The facts don't show a documented shift in meaning — mute has stayed rooted in the idea of dumbness or silence from its earliest recorded French form onward.

English also has two other, unrelated words spelled "mute": one from Middle French muetir (a verb, likely shortened from esmeutir, tracing to Proto-Germanic), and one from Latin mutare, "to change." These are separate origins tangled up under the same spelling, not cousins of this silent mute.