silent b lamb, lambaz

An ancient days, lambs were called lambaz.
What do you think of that? 

Before the year 1000, people in England were using an Old Norse word for lambs: lambaz.

If you had been living in those days, you would have said both letter m and letter b of lambaz.

The word thumb, in those long ago days, was thuma from an ancient Indian word, tum. The word from India, tum, meant swollen. By the time tum traveled to the English world, it had become thuma, meaning thick finger.

Thuma did not get a letter b until the late 1200s.

Maybe b got added to thumb because there was a little metal finger cap, called a thimble.

Thimbles were the little finger caps people put on their longest middle fingers when they were sewing to help push the needle through thick materials like leather and wool. There were no sewing machines in those days. All sewing was done by hand.  Strangely, the little metal finger caps were not put on a person's thumb, so why was it called a thimble? 

Let's look at silent b words:
lamb               bomb     comb    limb       dumb     plumb   

door jamb       tomb      climb     crumb   numb      thumb

By the year 1300, many people has stopped saying the letter b at the end of some of these words. People in Germany and Holland stopped spelling these words with letter b.

Although many people in England stopped saying letter b at the end of these words, they still spelled the words with b. Maybe the English people kept letter b because we do say the b sound here:
crumb > crumble > crumbles > crumbled > crumbling
limb > limber

Our words are very, very, very old! Many of them were being spoken before the time of the gladiators of Rome, long before the time of knights and princesses.

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