	Email		Print
	Bookmark		Link

H

H is the eighth 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 both British

British English

British English or UK English is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere....
and American English

American English

PhonologyIn many ways, compared to English language in England, North American English is conservative in its phonology. Some distinctive accents can be found on the East Coast of the United States , partly because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of English English at a time when those varieties we...
is aitch , though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects (see the discussion below). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this symbol is used to represent two sounds. Its lowercase form, , represents the voiceless glottal fricative

Voiceless glottal fricative

The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "Fricative consonant", is a type of sound used in some Speech communication languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior....
or 'aspirate', and its small capital form, , represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative

Voiceless epiglottal fricative

The voiceless epiglottal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is H....
.

Semitic letter ? most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative

Voiceless pharyngeal fricative

The voiceless pharyngeal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is h with stroke , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X....
.

Discussion

Ask a question about 'H'

Start a new discussion about 'H'

Answer questions from other users

Full Discussion Forum

Encyclopedia

H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

British English

British English or UK English is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere....
and American English

American English

Voiceless glottal fricative

Voiceless epiglottal fricative

History

The Semitic letter ? most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative

Voiceless pharyngeal fricative

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....
H stood for , but later on, this letter, eta
Eta (letter)

Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8. Letters that arose from Eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter I ....
(?, ?), became a long vowel, . (In Modern Greek, this phoneme

Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
has merged with , similar to the 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...
development

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....
where Middle English ea and ee came to be both pronounced as .)

Etruscan

Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna , in Italy....
and Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
had as a phoneme, but almost all Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages comprising all the languages that descend from Latin language, the language of ancient Rome....
lost the sound — Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian or Daco-Romanian ; self-designation: limba rom?na, ) is a Romance languages spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova....
later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, 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....
developed a secondary from F, before losing it again (and now has developed an allophone

Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
of in some Spanish-speaking countries, but this isn't spelled with h.) In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener, as well as for the phoneme . This may be because was sometimes lost between vowels in German. H is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
and trigraphs

Trigraph (orthography)

A trigraph is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined....
, such as ch in Spanish and English , French and Portuguese from , Italian , German , Czech and Slovak .

Usage in English

Name

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced and spelled aitch or occasionally eitch. Pronunciation and hence a spelling of haitch is usually considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is however standard in Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English also known as Anglo-Irish and Irish English is English language as spoken in Ireland, partly the result of the interaction of the English and Irish languages....
and Singaporean English. In Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

conventional_long_name = Northern Ireland|native_name= Tuaisceart ?ireannNorlin Airlann|motto =|image_map = Europe location N-IRL2.png...
it is a shibboleth

Shibboleth

Shibboleth is any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one's social or regional origin.It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group....
as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. This has also been indicative of Catholic school teaching in Australia

Australia

Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the southern hemisphere comprising the Australia of the world's smallest continent, the major island of Tasmania, and numerous list of islands of Australia in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans....
. The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an HTML page" or "a HTML page". The pronunciation may be a hypercorrection

Hypercorrection

Hypercorrection is a linguistic phenomenon which may take any of the following forms:# an elaborate, Prescription and description based correction of common usage, often introduced in an attempt to avoid vulgarity or informality, that results in wording commonly considered clumsier than the usual, colloquialism;...
formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary

Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language. Two fully-bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989; as of December 2008 the dictionary's current editors have completed a quarter of the third edition....
says the original name of the letter was ; this became in Latin, passed into English via Old French , and by Middle English was pronounced . The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is an American English dictionary of the English language published by Boston, Massachusetts publisher Houghton Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969....
derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.

Value

H occurs as a single-letter grapheme

Grapheme

In typography, a grapheme is the fundamental unit in writing systems. Graphemes include letter , Chinese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and all the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems....
(with value or silent

Silent letter

In an alphabet, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. Silent letters create problems for both native and non-native speakers of a language, as they make it more difficult to guess the spellings of spoken words or the pronunciations of written words....
) and in various digraph

Digraph

Digraph may refer to:* Digraph , a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
s, such as ch (French , Greek and Italian , German & Scots ), gh (silent, , or ) , ph (Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
words with ), rh (Greek words with ), sh , th (either like thin or like then), wh (either , or : see wine-whine merger

Phonological history of wh

The pronunciation of the Wh in English language has varied with time, and can still vary today between different regions. According to the Phonological history of English consonants and the Regional accents of English, it is most commonly realised as the consonant cluster or as ....
). In transcriptions of other writing systems

Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
, zh may occur (as in Russian

Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago

The name Doctor Zhivago can refer to:...
); this is generally pronounced in English, although this rendition is not necessarily faithful to the sound in the original language (as in the case of pinyin

Pinyin

Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most commonly used Romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu is the Chinese Language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"....
transcriptions).

H is silent in a syllable rime

Syllable rime

In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a Syllable nucleus and an optional Syllable coda. It is the part of the syllable used in Rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech....
, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed. H is often silent in the weak form

Weak form and strong form

In the phonology of stress-timed languages, the weak form of a word is a form that may be used when the word has no stress, and which is phoneme distinct from the strong form, used when the word is stressed....
of some function words beginning with H, including had, has, have, he, her, him, his. H is silent in some words of Romance origin:

Initially in heir, honest, honour, hour; for American English
American English

PhonologyIn many ways, compared to English language in England, North American English is conservative in its phonology. Some distinctive accents can be found on the East Coast of the United States , partly because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of English English at a time when those varieties we...
usually also herb, and sometimes homage; as well as non-anglicized loanwords such as hors-d'oeuvres
Internally in silhouette, chihuahua, and often piranha
For some speakers, also in an initial unstressed syllable, as in "an historic occasion", "an hotel".
After ex when x has value , as exhaust.
For many speakers, after a stressed vowel and before an unstressed, as annihilate, vehicle (but not vehicular).

Usage in Spanish

In Spanish, H is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo ('son'), hola ('hello'), and hábil ('skillful'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound . The sound exists in a number of dialects in Spanish, either as a syllable-final allophone of (for example Andalusia, Argentina or Cuba - vg. esto 'this' , or as a dialectal realization of Standard (for example Mexican caja 'box' ).

Usage in French

In the French language, the name of the letter is pronounced .

The French language classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways that must be learned to use French properly, even though it is a silent letter either way. The h muet, or "mute h", is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so singular nouns get the article le or la replaced by the sequence l. Similarly, words such as un, whose pronunciation would elide
Elision

Elision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce. Sometimes, sounds may be elided for euphony effect....
onto the following word would do so for a word with h muet.

For example Le hébergement becomes L'hébergement.

The other way is called h aspiré, or "aspirated h" (though it is still not aspirated) and is treated as a phantom consonant. Hence masculine nouns get the le, separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. There is no elision with such a word; the preceding word is kept separate by similar means.

Most words that begin with an h muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an h aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot). As is generally the case with French, there are numerous exceptions.

In some cases, an h was added to disambiguate the and semivowel pronunciations, before the introduction of the distinction between the letters V
V

V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled vee ....
and U
U

U is the twenty-first letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled u ....
: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

Some of these distinctions have been preserved in English through Anglo-French: an honour vs. a harp.

Dictionaries mark those words that have this second kind of h with a preceding mark, either an asterisk
Asterisk

An 'asterisk' is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star ....
, a dagger
Dagger (typography)

A dagger is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is also called an obelus, cross, or Obelism, from a Greek language word meaning "roasting spit" or "needle", or obelisk, its diminutive ....
, or a little circle lower than a degree-symbol.

Usage in German
In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced .

In the German language
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....
, this letter is used in the digraph "ch" and the trigraph "sch" to indicate completely different sounds. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word "heighten", only the first represents .

In 1901, there was a spelling reform
Spelling reform

Many languages have undergone spelling reform, where a deliberate, often officially sanctioned or mandated, change to spelling takes place. Proposals for such reform are also common....
which eliminated the silent in nearly all instances of

in native German words such as thun "to do" or Thür "door". It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as "theater" and "throne", which continue to be spelled with <th> even after the last German spelling reform.

Usage in other languages
Some languages, including, but not limited to, 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...
, 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....
, Slovak
Slovak language

The Slovak language , sometimes incorrectly called ?Slovakian?, is an Indo-European languages that belongs to the West Slavic languages .The Czech and Slovak languages are Mutual intelligibility which means that even after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia Czech may be used in all official proceedings and documents in Slovakia, and vice ver...
, Ukrainian
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
, Belarusian
Belarusian language

The Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusians and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland....
, 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....
and Finnish
Finnish language

Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by Finnish people outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden....
use H as a breathy voiced glottal fricative
Voiced glottal fricative

The breathy-voiced glottal transition, commonly called a voiced glottal fricative, is a type of sound used in some Speech communication languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior....
, often as an allophone
Allophone

In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar speech sounds that belong to the same phoneme. A phoneme is an abstract unit of speech sound that can distinguish words: That is, changing a phoneme in a word can produce another word....
of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Ukrainian
Ukrainian language

Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
and Belarusian
Belarusian language

The Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusians and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland....
it's rendered with the letter ?
?

or is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and Lower case forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule , based on a horizontally flipped majuscule E....
(note its difference from Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
pronunciation and romanisation).

In Irish
Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic languages of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people....
H after a consonant indicates lenition
Lenition

Lenition is a kind of consonant mutation that appears in many languages. Along with assimilation , it is one of the primary sources of historical linguistics of languages....
of that consonant; it is known as a séimhiú.

In computing

Codes

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 H is codepoint U+0048 and the lower case h is U+0068.

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 H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; 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....
01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.

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 H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.

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 "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.

H