Hosta

E ( /ˈiː/; named e, plural ees)^[1] is the fifth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech,^[2] Danish,^[2] Dutch,^[2] English,^[3] French,^[4] German,^[5] Hungarian,^[2] Latin,^[2] Norwegian,^[2] Spanish,^[6] and Swedish languages.^[2]

History

Egyptian hieroglyph q’	Phoenician he	Etruscan E	Greek Epsilon	Roman/Cyrillic E

⟨E⟩ differs little from its derivational source, the Greek letter epsilon ⟨Ε⟩. In etymology, the Semitic hê has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek hê became epsilon with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Although Middle English spelling used ⟨e⟩ to represent long and short /e/, the Great Vowel Shift, changed long /eː/ (as in me or bee) to /iː/ while short /e/ (as in met or bed) remains a mid vowel.

Usage

Like other Latin vowels, ⟨e⟩ came in a long and a short variety. Originally, the only difference was in length but later on, short ⟨e⟩ represented /ɛ/. In other languages that use the ⟨e⟩, it represents various other phonetic values, sometimes with accents to indicate contrasts (⟨e ê é è ë ē ĕ ě ẽ ė ẹ ę ẻ⟩).

Digraphs with ⟨e⟩ are common in many languages to indicate diphthongs and monophthongs, such as ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ee⟩ for /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, ⟨ei⟩ for /aɪ/ in German, and ⟨eu⟩ for /ø/ in French or /ɔɪ/ in German.

In English, the salient phenomenon silent e's, although arising from old inflections that have been dropped, still retain a function as they indicate that certain vowels in the word are long vowels (for example rat has a short vowel and rate has a long one).

⟨E⟩ is the most common (or highest frequency) letter in the English alphabet (starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU) and several other European languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. This makes it a hard and popular letter to use when writing lipograms. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) is considered a "dreadful" novel, and that "at least part of Wright's narrative issues were caused by language limitations imposed by the lack of E."^[7] Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit ⟨e⟩ and are considered better works.^[8]

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ε ε : Greek letter Epsilon
• Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter Epsilon
• Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
• Є є : Cyrillic letter Ukrainian Ye
• Э э : Cyrillic letter E
• ℮ : Estimated sign (used on prepackaged goods for sale within the European Union).
• € : Euro sign

Computing codes

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Echo	·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille

In British Sign Language (BSL), the letter ⟨e⟩ is signed by extending the index finger of the right hand touching the tip of index on the left hand with all fingers of left hand open.

References

External links

• Media related to E at Wikimedia Commons
• The Wiktionary entry for E
• The Wiktionary entry for e