E (named e /ˈiː/, plural ees) is a vowel and the fifth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.
⟨E⟩ differs little from its derivational source, the Greek letter epsilon ⟨Ε⟩. In etymology, the Semitic hê has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), a...
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E (named e /ˈiː/, plural ees) is a vowel and the fifth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in the Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish languages.
⟨E⟩ differs little from its derivational source, the Greek letter epsilon ⟨Ε⟩. In etymology, the Semitic hê has been suggested to have started as 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 /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...
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