English spelling is well-known for being a disaster. Most of this comes from English inheriting vocabulary from a variety of different languages with different pronunciation rules. On top of the original Germanic-family language have been layered strata of 9th-century Norse; 15th-century French; a regional dialect of 11th-century French; and academic re-interpretations of 1st-century-BC Latin and (mostly Attic) Greek with varying levels of historic accuracy.

An additional force which tends to make things worse is people trying to make it better. Spelling reform movements are, by their nature, opinionated about the "right" way to do things. Modern linguistics takes to heart the descriptivist axiom that "language is use," but that's a fairly recent development and many English rules have been shaped by the type of people who believe strongly about the "right" and "proper" way to do things and will move mountains to make everyone else conform to these beliefs.

One of the more successful of these movements tried to make English more prestigious by strengthening its historic ties to Latin, and reforming English to be more Latinate. This movement is responsible for a few rules of "proper" English grammar, like prohibitions against the split infinitive and ending clauses with a preposition. Small children have trouble with these rules because they intuit, correctly, that these rules are not natural parts of English and should be rejected. Given a choice between imitating 19th-century busybodies, and imitating Star Trek, there is an objective correct answer.

This movement also succeeded in getting silent letters added to a handful of words to emphasize the Latin root they derive from. Examples include:

• The b in debt
• The p in receipt
• The d in adventure
• The s in island

Of all the changes to make to English spelling, this has to be one of the worst to inflict upon regular speakers of the language. Spelling reform which only makes certain words even less phonetic, for the specific ideological goal of restoring historical cruft. Plus the approach is rather piecemeal focused on prominent words, making English even less systematic by adding special cases. I mean really, is there a rule for when the letter P can be silent?

Now, your eye might be caught by the penultimate item on that list. "I thought you said the letters they added were silent!" Yeah, that D is silent. They took the regular, normal English word "aventure" and added a silent D to it. But these goofs didn't phonetics good well, so while the other additions remained silent because they were inserted next to strong consonants, D doesn't want to stay silent when V is the only letter anchoring it. And now our language pronunciation has become polluted by these prescriptivist twits.

But no, the single stupidest example of English spelling is the last item on the list: adding the s to island to reinforce that it derives from the Latin word insula.

The English word "island" is not derived from the Latin word insula.

The word "island" is from from the Old English word "land," which means "land," plus the "i-" prefix, which is Old English for "small." It does not derive from Latin, has no relation to insula, and there's no goddamn reason to have an S in it.

This silent letter S was added to "island" to reinforce a historical etymology which does not exist and is factually incorrect. This is the stupidest example of spelling in the English language.

At least it's the stupidest one I am currently aware of. I'm willing to accept counter-proposals.