speech is silver, silence is golden
- idiom
- Informal
:
hablar es plata, callar es oro
- My grandmother often said, "speech is silver, silence is golden," especially when we were gossiping.
Examples
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Whenever he felt the urge to argue, he reminded himself that speech is silver, silence is golden.
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At the board meeting, she wisely followed the rule that speech is silver, silence is golden.
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Don't forget, speech is silver, silence is golden!
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Remember, speech is silver, silence is golden!
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My grandmother often said, "speech is silver, silence is golden," whenever we were tempted to gossip.
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At the meeting, he kept quiet, remembering that speech is silver, silence is golden.
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She always believed that speech is silver, silence is golden, especially in contentious discussions.
Synonyms
231
1.0
To stop making noise or talking
181
4.0
Not speaking about something when people ask you
90
2.5
To say nothing or not tell a secret
To keep quiet to avoid saying something silly
Saying very little about a problem helps people fix it quickly
To speak less and pay attention to other people's words
Not speaking to show your feelings or thoughts
Surface Forms
Morphology
speech + be + silver, + silence + be + golden
The phrase uses a metaphorical value comparison (silver vs. gold) to say silence is preferable to unnecessary speech. A B1 learner who knows the constituent words can often infer that 'golden' denotes greater value than 'silver' and thus deduce the proverb's point, but this requires figurative/cultural knowledge rather than strict compositionality.
Etymology
The saying speech is silver, silence is golden creates a simple picture of two metals: speech is like silver—useful but common—while silence is like gold—rarer and more valuable. So it means it is often better to stay quiet than to speak when it is not needed.