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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]
Contents
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph q’ |
Phoenician He |
Etruscan E |
Greek Epsilon |
Roman/ Cyrillic E |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
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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
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
- 𐤄 : Semitic letter He (letter), from which the following symbols originally derive
- Ε ε : Greek letter Epsilon, from which E derives
- Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye, which also derives from Epsilon
- Є є : Ukrainian Ye
- Э э : Cyrillic letter E
- Ǝ ɘ : Latin letter reversed e
- Ə ə : Latin letter schwa
- Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter epsilon
- ǝ : Latin letter turned e
- ∈ : the symbol for set membership in set theory.
- IPA-specific symbols related to E: ɚ ɜ ɝ
- 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
Ligatures and abbreviations
- € : Euro sign.
- ℮ : Estimated sign (used on prepackaged goods for sale within the European Union).
- ∃ : existential quantifier in predicate logic.
- ℯ : the base of the natural logarithm.
- ℇ : the Euler–Mascheroni constant.
Computing codes
| Character | E | e | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E | LATIN SMALL LETTER E | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 69 | U+0045 | 101 | U+0065 |
| UTF-8 | 69 | 45 | 101 | 65 |
| Numeric character reference | E | E | e | e |
| EBCDIC family | 197 | C5 | 133 | 85 |
| ASCII 1 | 69 | 45 | 101 | 65 |
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
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
- ↑ "E" a letter Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (1993). Ees is the plural of the name of the lettear; the plural of the letter itself is rendered E's, Es, e's, or es.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Ross Eckler, Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Word Play. New York: St. Martin's Press (1996): 3
- ↑ Eckler (1996): 3. Perec's novel "was so well written that at least some reviewers never realized the existence of a letter constraint."
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