E

For technical reasons, E# redirects here. For the musical note, see E (musical note). For the mathematical constant, see e (mathematical constant).

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. It is also the second vowel in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English (pronounced /ˈiː/) is spelled e; the plural is ees, though this is rare. The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, 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 /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek hê became Εψιλον (Epsilon) with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Arising from the Great Vowel Shift, English usage is rather different, namely /iː/ (derived from /eː/ 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 /ɛ/. 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 /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, EI for /aɪ/ in German, or EU for /ø/ in French or /ɔɪ/ 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 "<tt>&amp;#69;</tt>" and "<tt>&amp;#101;</tt>" 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.

Translation

The word "E" occurs as such in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Alemannic, Arabic, Aragonese, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Asturian, Azeri, Min Nan, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Corsican, Welsh, Danish, German, Estonian, Greek, Spanish, Esperanto, Basque, Persian, West Frisian, Friulian, Scottish Gaelic, Galician, Gan, Korean, Croatian, Ido, Ilokano, Icelandic, Italian, Hebrew, Georgian, Cornish, Swahili, Haitian, Latin, Latvian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Malagasy, Mazandarani, Malay, Nahuatl, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Norwegian (Nynorsk), Norman, Low Saxon, Polish, Portuguese, Crimean Tatar, Romanian, Quechua, Northern Sami, Saterland Frisian, Simple English, Slovak, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Vietnamese, Volapük, Yiddish, Yoruba, Cantonese, Samogitian, Chinese.

Translation(s) in other languages: Breton: E (lizherenn), French: E (lettre), Manx: Eboin, Macedonian: E (Латиница), Dutch: E (letter), Uzbek: E (harf), Russian: E (латиница), Serbian: E (слово латинице), Turkish: E (harf), Ukrainian: E (латиниця).