E

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the mathematical constant, see e (mathematical constant). For other uses, see E
(disambiguation).
For technical reasons, "E#" redirects here. For E sharp, see 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

v
t
e

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English-speaking world and do not represent a worldwide view of
the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk
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Writing cursive forms of E

E (named e /i/, 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, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Sp
anish, and Swedish.[2][3][4][5][6]

Contents
[hide]

1History
2Use in writing systems
o 2.1English
o 2.2Other languages
o 2.3Other systems
3Most common letter
4Related characters
o 4.1Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
o 4.2Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets
o 4.3Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations
5Computing codes
6Other representations
7References
8External links

History[edit]

Roman/
Egyptian hieroglyph Phoenician Etruscan Greek
Cyrillic
q He E Epsilon
E
The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, ''. This in turn comes from
the Semitic letter h, 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, h 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[edit]

Pronunciation of the name of the letter e in European languages

English[edit]
Although Middle English spelling used e to represent long and short /e/, the Great Vowel
Shift changed long /e/ (as in 'me' or 'bee') to /i/ while short // (as in 'met' or 'bed') remained a mid
vowel. In other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words.
Other languages[edit]
In the orthography of many languages it represents either [e], [e], [], or some variation (such as
a nasalized version) of these sounds, often with diacritics (as: e ) to indicate
contrasts. Less commonly, as in French, German, or Saanich, e represents a mid-central
vowel //. Digraphs with e are common to indicate either diphthongs or monophthongs, such as
ea or ee for /i/ or /e/ in English, ei for /a/ in German, and eu for // in French or // in
German.
Other systems[edit]
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses e for the close-mid front unrounded vowel or the mid
front unrounded vowel.

Most common letter[edit]

'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[edit]
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet [edit]

E with diacritics:

E e
: Latin AE ligature
: 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):
: Latin letter epsilon, which represents an open-mid front
unrounded vowel in the IPA
: Latin letter reversed epsilon, which represents an open-mid
central unrounded vowel in the IPA
: Latin letter schwa, which represents a mid central vowel in
the IPA
: Latin letter turned e, which is used in the writing systems
of some African languages
: Latin letter reversed e, which represents a close-mid central
unrounded vowel in the IPA
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets[edit]

: Semitic letter He (letter), from which the following symbols

originally derive
: Greek letter Epsilon, from which the following symbols
originally derive
: Cyrillic letter Ye
: Ukrainian Ye
: Cyrillic letter E
: Coptic letter Ei
: Old Italic E, which is the ancestor of modern Latin E
: Runic letter Ehwaz, which is possibly a descendent
of Old Italic E
: Gothic letter eyz

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations[edit]

: 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.
: the base of the natural logarithm.
: the EulerMascheroni constant.

Computing codes[edit]

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[edit]
NATO phonetic Morse code

Echo
 Braille
Signal flag Flag semaphore
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[edit]
1. Jump up^ "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 letter; the plural of the letter itself is
rendered E's, Es, e's, or es.
2. Jump up^ Kelk, Brian. "Letter frequencies". UK Free Software
Network. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
3. Jump up^ Lewand, Robert. "Relative Frequencies of Letters in
General English Plain text". Cryptographical Mathematics. Central
College. Archived from the original on 2008-07-08.
Retrieved 2008-06-25.
4. Jump up^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in Spanish".
Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
5. Jump up^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in French". Santa
Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
6. Jump up^ "Frequency of Occurrence of Letters in German".
Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Retrieved 2008-06-25.
7. Jump up^ Ross Eckler, Making the Alphabet Dance:
Recreational Word Play. New York: St. Martin's Press (1996): 3
8. Jump up^ Eckler (1996): 3. Perec's novel "was so well written
that at least some reviewers never realized the existence of a
letter constraint."

External links[edit]
Media related to E at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of E at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of e at Wiktionary

[hide]

Latin alphabet

History

Spread

Romanization

Roman numerals
phabet

Letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet

Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu
Letter E with diacritics

Ee

h
ets

cters in Unicode

Diacritics

Palaeography
Categories:
ISO basic Latin letters
Vowel letters
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This page was last edited on 27 June 2017, at 13:42.