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E

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
. Its name in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
is spelled e , plural ees (rare). The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the Czech

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
, Danish

Danish language

Danish is one of the North Germanic languages , a sub-group of the Germanic languages branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language....
, Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic languages spoken by over 22 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is very small. Most native...
, English

English language

French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
, German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
, Hungarian

Hungarian language

Hungarian is a Uralic languages unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in the seven neighbouring countries....
, Latin, Norwegian

Norwegian language

Norwegian is a North Germanic languages language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. It is also spoken as a second language among Norwegian-Americans in the United States of America, especially in the central northern states....
, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
, and Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic languages language, spoken by around 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the ?land islands....
languages.

is derived from the Greek letter

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
epsilon

Epsilon

Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a close-mid front unrounded vowel /e/. It is also the primary letter used in Real Analysis....
which is much the same in appearance (?, e) and function. In etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the roots and history of words; and how their form and meaning have changed over time.In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time....
, the Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....
hê
He (letter)

He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician alphabet , Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet , Syriac alphabet and Arabic alphabet ....
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.

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Encyclopedia

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

English language

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
, Danish

Danish language

Dutch language

English language

French language

German language

Hungarian language

Norwegian language

Spanish language

Swedish language

History

E is derived from the Greek letter

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
epsilon

Epsilon

Etymology

Semitic

Etruria

Etruria — usually referred to in Greek language and Latin language source texts as Tyrrhenia — was a region of Central Italy, an area that covered part of what now are Tuscany, Latium, Emilia-Romagna and Umbria....
s and Romans

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
followed this usage. Arising from the Great Vowel Shift

Great Vowel Shift

The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1200 and 1600....
, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
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 vowel

Latin spelling and pronunciation

The Roman alphabet, or Latin alphabet, was adapted from the Old Italic alphabet, to represent the phonemes of the Latin, which had in turn been borrowed from the Greek alphabet, adapted from the Phoenician alphabet....
s, 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

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language....
E or e, it represents various other phonetic values, sometimes with accents to indicate contrasts (e ê é è ë e e e ? e ? e ?).

Digraphs starting with E are common in many languages to indicate diphthong

Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
s and monophthong

Monophthong

A monophthong is a "pure" vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not semivowel towards a new position of articulation; compare diphthong....
s, such as EA or EE for or in English, EI for in German

German language

French language

Silent E

Silent e is a writing convention in English language spelling. When reading, the silent letter e at the end of a word signals a specific pronunciation of the preceding vowel letter, as in the difference between "rid" and "ride" ....
), 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

Frequency (statistics)

In statistics the frequency of an Event i is the number ni of times the event occurred in the experiment or the study. These frequencies are often graphically represented in histograms....
) letter in the English language

English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
(starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU

ETAOIN SHRDLU

ETAOIN SHRDLU is the approximate order of Frequency analysis of the twelve most commonly used letters in the English language, best known as a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print in the days of "Hot metal typesetting" publishing due to a custom of Linotype machine operators....
) and many other related languages, which has implications in both cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of hiding information. In modern times cryptography is considered a branch of both mathematics and computer science and is affiliated closely with information theory, computer security and engineering....
and data compression

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression or source coding is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than an code representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes....
. This makes it a difficult and popular letter to use when writing lipogram

Lipogram

A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is omitted, usually a common vowel, the most common in English language being e ....
s. Ernest Vincent Wright

Ernest Vincent Wright

Ernest Vincent Wright was an United States of America author. His most famous work is Gadsby: Champion of Youth, "A Story of Over 50,000 Words", which, except for the introduction and a note at the end, did not use the letter e....
'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

Georges Perec

Georges Perec was a highly-regarded France Judaism novelist, filmmaker and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group....
's novel A Void
A Void (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

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
the capital E is codepoint U+0045 and the lower case e is U+0065.

The ASCII

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange , is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words....
code for capital E is 69 and for lower case e is 101; or in binary

Binary numeral system

The binary numeral system, or notation with a radix of 2. Owing to its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry using logic gates, the binary system is used internally by all modern computers....
01000101 and 01100101, respectively.

The EBCDIC

EBCDIC

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code is an 8-bit character encoding used on IBM mainframe operating systems such as z/OS, OS/390, VM and VSE , as well as IBM midrange computer operating systems such as OS/400 and i5/OS ....
code for capital E is 197 and for lowercase e is 133.

The numeric character reference

Numeric character reference

A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-based markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of character s that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode....
s in HTML

HTML

HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
and XML are "E" and "e" for upper and lower case, respectively.

E

History

Usage

Codes for computing

See also