E

The fifth letter of the Roman alphabet, E is derived from the Greek letter epsilon which is much the same in appearance (Ε, ε) and function. The Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure. In Semitic, the letter was pronounced /h/ (in foreign words also /e/), in Greek hê became Εψιλον (Epsilon) with the value /e/. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage. Due to the Great Vowel Shift, English usage is rather different, namely /i:/ in ME or BEE, whereas other words like BED are quite close to Latin or Continental European usage.

Like other Latin vowels, e came in a long (sounded as in thee) and a short variety (sounded as in pet). In other languages which use the letter it takes on various other values, sometimes with accents to indicate which one (ê,é,è,ë).

On computers the uppercase letter is represented with ASCII code 69 and the lowercase letter with code 101. This is the most common letter in English and many related languages, which has some implications in Cryptography.

Echo represents the letter E in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Meanings for E

• In biochemistry, E is the symbol for glutamic acid and also often an abbreviation for enzyme.
• In computing, the letter e (with or without a subsequent hyphen) is often used as a prefix for other words to imply "electronic," such as e-mail or e-commerce.
• In currency, e is commonly used symbol for the euro when the symbol € is not available.
• In English slang, e is often used as an abbreviation of ecstasy, a synthetic drug.
• In film, E is a Canadian film from 1982; see E (film).
• In finance securities, E is stock symbol for ENI Spa
• In gender-neutral pronouns, e is the Spivak pronoun meaning he or she.
• In international licence plate codes, E stands for Spain (España).
• In mathematics,
  • e is Euler's number, a transcendental number (approximately equal to 2.71828182846) which is used as the base for natural logarithms. See e (mathematical constant).
  • E is also used to signify ×10^y; i.e. 7e8 is 7×10⁸ or 700,000,000.
  • E is often used as a digit meaning fourteen in hexadecimal and other positional numeral systems with a radix of 15 or greater.
• In the Metric system, E, exa, is the SI prefix meaning 10¹⁸.
• In music, E is a note.
• In physics, E is,
  • The symbol for energy, as in .
  • The symbol for electric field.
• In probability and statistics, a capital E denotes expected value.
• In structural engineering E stands for the modulus of elasticity.
• In symbolic logic (a backwards E) is the symbol for "there exists...", called the existential quantifier. Example: .
• In video games, E is the ESRB rating symbol for Everyone.
• 鄂, or È is an abbreviation for the Hubei province of the People's Republic of China.
• In computational complexity theory, the complexity class E.

Two-letter combinations starting with E:

• ea eb ec ed ee ef eg eh ei ej ek el em en eo ep eq er es et eu ev ew ex ey ez