Silence

Silence is a status effect that prevents those affected from using active hero abilities for the duration of the silence. It can be useful when ganking a hero with a blink or invisibility spell, as silences tend to have longer duration than other disables giving more time to kill the enemy. Silences in team fights can also be very effective even for a short time as they prevent the enemy from using their spell in combination with one another. Silencing an opponent will also stop any channeling spells that they are currently using.

Mechanics
When a unit is silenced, the ability icons in its HUD are overlayed by a grid-like effect. Clicking on an active ability, or pressing its hotkey displays the word "Silenced" in red at wherever the player's mouse courser currently is.

Silence disables every active ability, including toggle abilities and active attack modifier. If an ability is being channelled, Silence will cancel it immediately. If an ability is toggled on, Silence will not turn it off, but will prevent the player from toggling it off. If the toggle ability drains mana and the unit runs out of mana while silenced, the ability will toggle off normally.

Silence does not stop the effects of already casted spells. For example silencing after he already cast  or  will not stop the link from draining or the storm from striking.

Silence does not disable any passive ability. Although Silence prevents for example from using the active part of, it does not cause the aura to stop granting attack damage bonus. Even when a passive ability has a cooldown or mana cost, Silence never affect them in any way.

Sources of Silence

 * Besides the listed abilities, all hex abilities silence, mute and disarm affected units.

Mute
As a counterpart to silence, a Mute disables the affected unit's active items in the same fashion as Silence disables active abilities. As with Silence, it does not affect passives at all. It does not stop already ongoing effects of items, but does cancel channeled items. It also prevents the unit from toggling their toggle items on or off.

Sources of Mute

 * Besides the listed abilities, non-sharable items are always muted when picked up by a different unit than the owner.