E

‹E› differs little from its derived source, the Greek letter epsilon ‹Ε›. 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 indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek hê became epsilon with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Although Middle English spelling used ‹e› to represent long and short /e/, the Great Vowel Shift, changed long /eː/ (as in me or bee) to /iː/ while short {{IPA|/e/)) (as in met or bed) remains a mid vowel.

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 ‹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›).

In English, the salient phenomenon silent e's, although arising from old inflections that have been dropped, still retain a function as they indicate that certain vowels in the word are long vowels (for example rat has a short vowel and rate has a long one).

In Unicode, the capital ‹E› is codepoint U+0045 and the lower case ‹e› is U+0065.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "E" and "e" for upper and lower case, respectively.

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

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