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.

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.