E
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E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled e (pronounced /iː/), plural es or ees (also written E's, Es, e's, etc.).[1] The letter E is the most commonly used letter in the English, French, German and in the Spanish language.[2]
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[edit] History
| Egyptian hieroglyph q’ |
Proto-Semitic H |
Phoenician H |
Etruscan E |
Greek Epsilon |
Roman E |
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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 use
- The letter 'e' (lower case) is used to represent the base of the natural logarithm (≈ 2.71828). See e (mathematical constant).
- The letter 'E' is the most common (or highest frequency) letter in the English language and many other related languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. This also makes it a difficult and popular letter to use when writing lipograms.
- The letter 'E' is also used in scientific notation to represent the base 10 exponent. (eg, 3E+2 = 3 × 102 = 3 × 100 = 300)
- The letter 'E' is used in probability theory and statistics to denote a random variable's expected value or mean.
See also the mathematics section of the disambiguation page.
[edit] Scientific use
- The uppercase letter E is also used to represent Young's modulus, a material property.
- The lower case letter e is used to represent the electron or the elementary charge.
- The lower case letter e is also used in place of ε (epsilon) when proper symbols are unavailable. For example: e0, for ε0, the electric constant.
See also the science section of the disambiguation page.
[edit] Codes for computing
| NATO phonetic | Morse code | ||
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| Signal flag | Flag semaphore | ASL Manual | Braille |
In Unicode the capital E is codepoint U+0045 and the lower case 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.
In hexadecimal notation, E, 0xE, 0Eh, #0e, (and similar variants), all represent the number 14.
See also the computing section of the disambiguation page.
[edit] Sources
- ^ "E" Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
- ^ http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/cryptogr.htm Cryptography Site
[edit] See also
Similar Latin letters:
- Ɛɛ : Latin epsilon
Similar non-Latin letters:
- Εε : Greek epsilon
- Ее : Cyrillic Ye/E
- Ёё : Cyrillic Yo
- Єє : Ukrainian Ye
- Ээ : Cyrillic backwards E
Similar phonetic symbols:
Special symbols similar to the letter E:
- ℮ : Estimated sign (used on prepackaged goods for sale within the European Union).
- € : Euro sign
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Letter E with diacritics
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters |
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