E

This article is about the letter. For Euler's number, see e (mathematical constant). For other uses of the symbol e or E, see E (disambiguation).
E
E e
Usage
Writing system Latin script
Type Alphabetic
Language of origin Latin language
Phonetic usage
Unicode codepoint U+0045, U+0065
Alphabetical position 5
History
Development
Time period c. 700 BC to present
Descendants
Sisters
Other
Other letters commonly used with ee, e(x), e(x)(y)
Writing direction Left-to-Right

E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e (pronounced ); plural es, Es or E's. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph
qʼ 		Proto-Sinaitic Proto-Canaanite

hillul

Phoenician
He 		Etruscan
E 		Greek
Epsilon 		Latin/
Cyrillic
E
A28
Latin E

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 most likely 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

Pronunciation of the name of the letter ⟨e⟩ in European languages

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 /ɛ/ (as in met or bed) remained a mid vowel. In other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words like queue.

Other languages

In the orthography of many languages it represents either [e], [e̞], [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 French, German, or 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 language 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 (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." Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit 'e' and are considered better works.

Related characters

Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

  • 𐤄 : Semitic letter He (letter), from which the following symbols originally derive
    • Ε ε : Greek letter Epsilon, from which the following symbols originally derive
      • Е е : Cyrillic letter Ye
      • Є є : Ukrainian Ye
      • Э э : Cyrillic letter E
      • Ⲉ ⲉ : Coptic letter Ei
      • 𐌄 : Old Italic E, which is the ancestor of modern Latin E
        • ᛖ : Runic letter Ehwaz, which is possibly a descendant of Old Italic E
      • 𐌴 : Gothic letter eyz

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

Code points

Character information
Preview E e
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E LATIN SMALL LETTER E
Encodings decimal hex dec 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

NATO phonetic Morse code
Echo

⠑
Signal flag Flag semaphore American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling) Braille dots-15
Unified English Braille

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.

Use as a number

A scientific calculator display showing the Avogadro constant (6.02214076×1023 reciprocal moles) in E notation
  • In the hexadecimal (base 16) numbering system, "E" corresponds to the number 14 in decimal (base 10) counting.
  • "e" is also commonly used to denote Euler's number.

See also

  • "E notation" is used by scientific calculators to indicate a power of ten multiplier.
  • E-number – Codes for food additives