E

ISO basic Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

Writing cursive forms of E

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

History

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

The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, 'Ε'. This in turn comes from the Semitic letter hê, which 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 the letter epsilon, used to represent /e/. The various forms of the Old Italic script and the Latin alphabet followed this usage.

Use in writing systems

English

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') remained a mid vowel. In other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words.

Other languages

In the orthography of many languages it represents either these or /ɛ/, or some variation (such as a nasalized version) of these sounds, often with diacritics (as: ⟨e ê é è ë ē ĕ ě ẽ ė ẹ ę ẻ⟩) to indicate contrasts. Less commonly, as in Saanich, ⟨e⟩ represents a mid-central vowel /ə/. Digraphs with ⟨e⟩ are common to indicate either diphthongs or 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.

Other systems

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses ⟨e⟩ for the close-mid front unrounded vowel or the mid front unrounded vowel.

Most common letter

'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. In the story The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, a character figures out a random character code by remembering that the most used letter in English is E. 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 supposedly "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 characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

• E with diacritics: Ĕ ĕ Ê ê Ě ě Ɇ ɇ Ė ė Ẹ ẹ Ë ë È è É é Ē ē Ẽ ẽ Ę ę
• Æ æ : Latin AE ligature
• Œ œ : Latin OE ligature
• The umlaut diacritic ¨ used above a vowel letter in German and other languages to indicate a fronted or front vowel (this sign originated as a superscript e)
• Phonetic alphabet symbols related to E (the International Phonetic Alphabet only uses lowercase, but uppercase forms are used in some other writing systems):
  • Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter epsilon, which represents an open-mid front unrounded vowel in the IPA
  • ɜ : Latin letter reversed epsilon, which represents an open-mid central unrounded vowel in the IPA
  • Ə ə : Latin letter schwa, which represents a mid central vowel in the IPA
  • Ǝ ǝ : Latin letter turned e, which is used in the writing systems of some African languages
  • ɘ : Latin letter reversed e, which represents a close-mid central unrounded vowel in the IPA

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

• 𐤄 : Semitic letter He (letter), from which the following symbols originally derive
  • Ε ε : Greek letter Epsilon, from which the following symbols originally derive
    • Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
    • Є є : Ukrainian Ye
    • Э э : Cyrillic letter E
    • Ⲉ ⲉ : Coptic letter Ei
    • 𐌄 : Old Italic E, which is the ancestor of modern Latin E
      • ᛖ : Runic letter Ehwaz, which is possibly a descendent of Old Italic E
    • 𐌴 : Gothic letter eyz

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

• € : Euro sign.
• ℮ : Estimated sign (used on prepackaged goods for sale within the European Union).
• ∃ : existential quantifier in predicate logic.
• ∈ : the symbol for set membership in set theory.
• ℯ : the base of the natural logarithm.
• ℇ : the Euler–Mascheroni constant.

Computing codes

¹ Also for 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 dots-15

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 dictionary definition of E at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of e at Wiktionary