silent
Inflation could silently erode your purchasing power.
They declare that the disease may be dormant, or develop silently, for twenty or thirty years before manifesting.
Hepatitis C can exist symptom-free for decades, silently damaging your liver.
Dry rot was silently eroding their own floorboards.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Unaware
be in the darkidiom
be on another planetidiom
benighted
benightedly
blind spot
blindly
foggy
Goodness/God/Heaven/Christ knowsidiom
illiterate
imperceptive
in blissful ignoranceidiom
innumeracy
innumerate
insensate
stump
unattuned
unawakened
unaware
unawareness
unbeknownst

silently | American Dictionary

silently
adverb
us/ˈsɑɪ·lənt·li/

silentlyadverb (WITHOUT SPEAKING)

without speaking, or only in the mind:
After losing, the US players walked off the field silently.

silentlyadverb (QUIETLY)

without any sound; quietly:
Silently, he crept up the stairs.

Examples of silently

silently
If we understood the matter at the right level of detail, it could reveal that a child silently considers and rejects 20 grammars a day.
Silently, they repudiated humanity's lingering claims to special privilege inside a universe no longer ordered by theology.
They addressed him formerly and would stand silently before him waiting until he granted permission to speak.
For this task, children silently read short sentences as quickly as possible and judged their semantic correctness.
This is to allow those not interested to pass silently through without activating a response.
They silently accepted my o^er, climbing into the back of my car and politely indicating where they wanted to descend.
Instead of introducing an explicit inference rule, we make this step silently whenever appropriate in order to avoid excessive syntactic baggage.
Here it would appear that the stranger was reading silently to begin with, but that courtesy demanded that she read aloud when asked.
Movies make the learner's articulatory organs work even when the learner is merely watching the movies silently.
She viewed him as silently arrogating to himself the status of head of the household, while demoting her to that of a mere dependent.
There need have been no signs in the arm; the bacteraemia could have silently gained ascendancy.
Silently the economists retreated in the face of the facts, and population came to be regarded as outside the economic paradigm.
Writing that was intended to be read silently developed distinctive vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation.
Well, if there wasn't music we'd be doing homework silently.
Nevertheless, for the most part, orthopedists (and patients) comply silently with this regulation in order to avoid painful conflicts or endless hassles.
See all examples of silently
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.