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H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English 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 or 'aspirate', and its small capital form, , represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.
Semitic letter ? most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative .

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Encyclopedia
H is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English 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 or 'aspirate', and its small capital form, , represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative.
History
The Semitic letter ? most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek H stood for , but later on, this letter, eta (?, ?), became a long vowel, . (In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with , similar to the English development where Middle English ea and ee came to be both pronounced as .)
Etruscan and Latin had as a phoneme, but almost all Romance languages lost the sound — Romanian later re-borrowed the phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, Spanish developed a secondary from F, before losing it again (and now has developed an allophone 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 and trigraphs, 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 and Singaporean English. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. This has also been indicative of Catholic school teaching in Australia. 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 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 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 derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic.
Value
H occurs as a single-letter grapheme (with value or silent) and in various digraphs, such as ch (French , Greek and Italian , German & Scots ), gh (silent, , or ) , ph (Greek words with ), rh (Greek words with ), sh , th (either like thin or like then), wh (either , or : see wine-whine merger). In transcriptions of other writing systems, zh may occur (as in Russian Doctor Zhivago); 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 transcriptions).
H is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed.
H is often silent in the weak form 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 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 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 and 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, a dagger, 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, 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 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, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Hungarian and Finnish use H as a breathy voiced glottal fricative , often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.
In Ukrainian and Belarusian it's rendered with the letter ? (note its difference from Russian pronunciation and romanisation).
In Irish H after a consonant indicates lenition of that consonant; it is known as a séimhiú.
In computing
Codes In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lower case h is U+0068.
The ASCII code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
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