E
The letter E is the fifth letter in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is pronounced . Also, the letter E is the most commonly used letter in the English language.
Encyclopedia
The letter
E is the fifth letter in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is pronounced . Also, the letter
E is the most commonly used letter in the English language.
History
| Egyptian hieroglyph q’ | Proto-Semitic H | Phoenician H | Etruscan E | Greek Epsilon |
|---|
A28 | | | | |
E is derived from the
Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance and function. The
Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure , and was probably based on a similar
Egyptian hieroglyph that was pronounced and used quite differently. In Semitic, the letter represented , in Greek
hê became ?????? with the value .
Etruscans and
Romans followed this usage. Arising from the Great Vowel Shift,
English usage is rather different, namely
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, it represents various other phonetic values, sometimes with accents to indicate contrasts . Digraphs starting with E are common in many languages to indicate diphthongs 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 , 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 long .
This is the most common letter in
English and many related languages, which has some implications in
cryptography. This also makes it a difficult and popular letter to use when writing lipograms.
Codes for computing
In
Unicode the capital E is codepoint U+0045 and the lowercase e is U+0065.
The
ASCII code for capital E is 69 and for lowercase e is 101; or in
binary 01000101 and 01100101, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital E is 197 and for lowercase e is 133.
The numeric character references in
HTML and XML are "
E" and "
e" for upper and lower case respectively.
Meanings of E
- In astronomy,
- E stands for a March 1 through 15 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet or asteroid .
- E would stand for Earth, in the provisional designation of any ring or natural satellite discovered around it.
- In the atmosphere of Earth, the E layer is part of the ionosphere.
- In biochemistry, E is the symbol for glutamic acid and also often an abbreviation for enzyme.
- In computing,
- The letter e is often used as a prefix for other words to imply "electronic", such as e-mail or e-commerce.
- E is also a programming language available for the Amiga. It's related to C and Pascal. See Amiga E.
- The E programming language is an object-oriented language for secure distributed computing.
- In computational complexity theory, the complexity class E is a variant of the class EXPTIME of problems solvable in exponential time.
- In currency, E is sometimes used as symbol for the euro when the symbol € is not available.
- In education, E is a very low grade, except in some grading systems such as the one used in the USA which goes from D to F, omitting E.
- In electrochemistry, E is a symbol for electrode potential, and E° is a symbol for standard electrode potential.
- In English slang, E is a term for Ecstasy or MDMA, a synthetic drug which is often used recreationally.
- In film, E is a Canadian film from 1982; see E .
- In finance, E is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for ENI Spa
- In gender-neutral pronouns, e is the Spivak pronoun meaning he or she.
- In geography and weather forecasting, E stands for east, one of the four cardinal directions.
- In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /e/ refers to the close-mid front unrounded vowel. Its turned counterpart, /?/, stands for the mid central vowel or schwa.
- In Japanese, E is a romanization of the kana ? and ?.
- In legal metrology, the "estimated" sign following a measurement of quantity is used to indicate that the measurement of weight or volume is done according to preset rules with specific allowable variances.
- In international licence plate codes, E stands for Spain .
- In mathematics,
- e is Euler's number, a transcendental number which is used as the base for natural logarithms.
- One version of a representation of e is
- Another representation of e is the limit as x approaches infinity of .
- A small-caps e is also used to signify y×10x; i.e. 7e8 is 7×108 or 700,000,000.
- E is often used as a digit meaning fourteen in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 15 or greater.
- In the SI system, E, exa, is the SI prefix meaning 1018.
- In music, E is a note .
- In nutrition, E is a vitamin.
- In physics, E is,
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In probability and statistics, a capital E or blackboard bold denotes expected value.
- In radio,
- the NATO E band ranges from 2 to 3 GHz.
- In set theory, denotes set membership.
- In sports, E# refers to a team's elimination number.
- In structural engineering, E stands for the modulus of elasticity.
- In symbolic logic, ? is the symbol for "there exists...", called the existential quantifier. Example: .
- In weights and measures, e is the EEC Mark indicating that a package has been made up in accordance with the average system.
- In video games, E is the ESRB
...
rating symbol for Everyone.
See also
Similar non-Latin letters:
