E is the
fifth letter in the
Latin alphabet. It is also the second
vowel in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English () is spelled
e; or rarely "ee", and the plural is
ees, though this is rare. The letter
E is the most commonly used letter in the
Czech,
,
,
,
French,
German,
Hungarian,
,
,
, and
Swedish languages.
History
E is derived from the
Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance (Ε, ε) and function. In
etymology, the
Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure (
hillul jubilation), and was probably based on a similar
Egyptian hieroglyph that was pronounced and used quite differently. In Semitic, the letter represented (and in foreign words), in Greek
hê became Εψιλον (Epsilon) with the value .
Etruscans and
Romans followed this usage. Arising from the
Great Vowel Shift,
English usage is rather different, namely (derived from in "me" or "bee") whereas other words like "bed" are closer to Latin and other languages in usage.
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 . In other languages that use the
letter E or 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 starting with E are common in many languages to indicate
diphthongs and
monophthongs, such as EA or EE for or in English, EI for in
German, or EU for in
French or in German.
At the end of a word, E is very often silent in English (
silent e), where old noun
inflections have been dropped, although even when silent at the end of a word, it often causes vowels in the word to be pronounced as
diphthongs, conventionally called
long vowels (compare as a noun
rat and as a verb
rate).
The letter 'E' is the most common (or highest
frequency) letter in the
English language (starting off the typographer's phrase
ETAOIN SHRDLU) and many other related
languages, which has implications in both
cryptography and
data compression. This makes it a difficult 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 difficulties were caused by language restrictions imposed by the lack of
E." Both
Georges Perec's novel
A Void (
La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit the letter E and are considered better works.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the
capital E is codepoint U+0045 and the
lower case e is U+0065.
The
ASCII code for capital E is 69 (01000101 in
binary), and the code for lowercase e is 101 (01100101 in
binary).
The
EBCDIC code for capital E is 197, and the code for lowercase e is 133.
The
numeric character references in
HTML and
XML are "
E" and "
e" for upper and lower case, respectively.
In
British Sign Language (BSL), the letter 'e' is represented as extended index of right hand touching the tip of index on the left hand. All fingers of left hand should be open.
See also
See E (disambiguation) for uses of the letter ESimilar Latin letters:
Similar non-Latin letters:
Similar phonetic symbols:
Special symbols similar to the letter E:
- ℮ : Estimated sign (used on prepackaged goods for sale within the European Union).
