The current research was conducted in French. Both French and English have orthographic systems that are considered to be opaque; however, the source of their opacity differs. Whereas most inconsistencies in English are due to vowels, most inconsistencies in French are due to silent consonants at the end of words. To illustrate, a comparison was conducted using French and English lexical databases. When comparing monosyllabic words with inconsistent consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) endings, silent letters were the source of phoneme-to-grapheme inconsistencies in 94% of French cases as compared with less than 1% of English cases. In the current research, the role of phoneme-to-grapheme consistency on oral word learning was examined by comparing children’s performance with words that did or did not include silent consonant endings.