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Concept
E
Summary
E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e (pronounced 'iː); plural es, Es or E's. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Latvian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.
The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its source, the Greek letter epsilon, 'Ε'. This in turn comes from the Semitic letter hê, which has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), and was most likely based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words); in Greek, hê became the letter epsilon, used to represent /e/. The various forms of the Old Italic script and the Latin alphabet followed this usage.
Although Middle English spelling used to represent long and short e, the Great Vowel Shift changed long /eː/ (as in 'me' or 'bee') to /iː/ while short ɛ (as in 'met' or 'bed') remained a mid vowel. In other cases, the letter is silent, generally at the end of words like queue.
In the orthography of many languages it represents either e, e̞, ɛ, or some variation (such as a nasalized version) of these sounds, often with diacritics (as: ) to indicate contrasts. Less commonly, as in French, German, or Saanich, represents a mid-central vowel /ə/. Digraphs with are common to indicate either diphthongs or monophthongs, such as or for /iː/ or /eɪ/ in English, for /aɪ/ in German, and for /ø/ in French or /ɔɪ/ in German.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses e for the close-mid front unrounded vowel or the mid front unrounded vowel.
'E' is the most common (or highest-frequency) letter in the English language alphabet and several other European languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression.
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