Silent e

In English orthography, many words feature a silent ⟨e⟩, most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English.

In a large class of words, as a consequence of a series of historical sound changes, including the Great Vowel Shift affecting long vowels, the former presence of the vowel sound represented by the ⟨e⟩ left its mark in the form of a change in the pronunciation of the preceding vowel. This can be seen in words such as rid /rɪd/ and ride /raɪd/, in which the presence of the final, unpronounced ⟨e⟩ appears to alter the sound of the preceding ⟨i⟩. A silent ⟨e⟩ which has this effect is sometimes called a magic ⟨e⟩. The normal effect is to convert a short vowel sound to a long one, but because of the complications of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowel is not simply a lengthened version of the corresponding short one, and in most cases (as in the example of ride) is in fact a diphthong.

This vowel-altering effect of silent ⟨e⟩ entered into modern English orthography, and is present in new words (such as bike) in which there is no historical reason for the presence of the ⟨e⟩ other than the need to mark the pronunciation of the preceding vowel.

When silent ⟨e⟩ occurs at the end of an English word, it usually converts a preceding vowel to its "long" equivalent, which means that it makes a vowel "say its name" (except in the case of ⟨y⟩, which has the same pronunciation as ⟨i⟩ – compare byte/bite).

...
Wikipedia