Category:English terms with unexpected final devoicing

In prehistoric Old English, final fricatives were devoiced; compare Old English līf to Old High German līb (“life”). In standard English, this process did not affect plosives (e.g. road) or secondary word-final fricatives (e.g. love), but some dialects devoiced these consonants, especially when unstressed (this was particularly common in Middle English). No modern variety universally has this devoicing, but some devoiced forms survive dialectally (e.g. anythink) or have been adopted in the standard language (most notably in the past tense of some irregular verbs, such as sent, aided by analogy with e.g. kept).