E is the 5th 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, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian,
Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. History
The Latin letter '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, and was probably based on a
similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In
Semitic, the letter represented ; in Greek, hê diverged into epsilon, having
the value , and eta, having the value in classical Greek and in modern Greek.
Etruscans and Romans followed this usage.
Use in writing systems = English =
Although Middle English spelling used ⟨e⟩ to represent long and short , the
Great Vowel Shift changed long to while short remained a mid vowel.
= Other languages = In the orthography of many languages it
represents either these or , or some variation of these sounds, often with
diacritics to indicate contrasts. Less commonly, as in Saanich, ⟨e⟩ represents
a mid-central vowel . Digraphs with ⟨e⟩ are common to indicate diphthongs and
monophthongs, such as ⟨ea⟩ or ⟨ee⟩ for or in English, ⟨ei⟩ for in German, and
⟨eu⟩ for in French or 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 letter in the English alphabet 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 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." Both Georges Perec's novel A Void
and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit 'e' and are considered better
works. Related characters
= Ancestors, descendants and siblings = 𐤄 : Semitic letter He, 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 Ɛ ɛ : Latin letter Epsilon
Ə ə : Latin letter Schwa Ǝ ǝ : Latin letter reversed 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.
∃ : existential quantifier in predicate logic.
ℯ : Euler's number 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 In British Sign Language, 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