E

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see E (disambiguation).

E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pronounced /iː/. The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the English language.^[1]

[edit] History

Egyptian hieroglyph q’	Proto-Semitic H	Phoenician H	Etruscan E	Greek Epsilon	Roman E

E is derived from the Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance (Ε, ε) and function. In etymology, the Semitic hê 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. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek hê became Εψιλον (Epsilon) with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Arising from the Great Vowel Shift, English usage is rather different, namely /iː/ (derived from /eː/ in "me" or "bee") whereas other words like "bed" are closer to Latin and other languages in usage.

[edit] 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 /ɛ/. In other languages that use the letter E or e, it represents various other phonetic values, sometimes with accents to indicate contrasts (e ê é è ë ē ĕ ě ẽ ė ẹ ę ẻ).

Digraphs starting with E are common in many languages to indicate diphthongs and monophthongs, such as EA or EE for /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, EI for /aɪ// in German, or EU for /ø/ in French or /ɔɪ/ in German.

At the end of a word, E is very often silent in English (silent E), 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).

[edit] Mathematical constant

For the number that is base of the natural logarithm (≈ 2.71828), see e (mathematical constant).

The letter 'E' is the most common letter in the English language and many other related languages, which have some implications in cryptography. This also makes it a difficult and popular letter to use when writing lipograms.

[edit] Scientific Use

The letter E is often used to represent energy, most famously in the formula "E=mc²."

[edit] 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.

[edit] Sources