E

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Basic Latin alphabet

	Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd
Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj
Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp
Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv
	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz

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]

1 History
2 Usage
3 Mathematical use
4 Scientific use
5 Codes for computing
6 Sources
7 See also

History

Egyptian hieroglyph q’	Proto-Semitic H	Phoenician H	Etruscan E	Greek Epsilon	Roman E
<hiero>A28</hiero>

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.

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).

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.

Scientific use

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

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of E

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Echo		·

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

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. In hexadecimal notation, E, 0xE, 0Eh, #0e, (and similar variants), all represent the number 14.

Sources

^ "E" Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993)
^ http://www.jimloy.com/puzz/cryptogr.htm Cryptography Site

E

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