E

E is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the front vowel /e/. Historically it is from Phoenician he by way of Greek epsilon. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter E the digit 5; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

The Latin E's descent in sound, from Phoenician he through Greek epsilon, appears elsewhere in this atlas; here the subject is the letterform itself. Phoenician he is usually read as a stick figure with raised arms, simplified over centuries of Semitic scribal use into a set of horizontal strokes off a vertical spine. Greek epsilon kept that basic three-bar structure and fixed it as a vowel, and the Etruscan and Roman capital E that followed is barely distinguishable from the Greek letter it was copied from: a vertical stroke crossed by three horizontal bars, a shape essentially unchanged in monumental inscriptions from the classical period to the present. The lowercase e took a different path. Roman cursive handwriting closed the open middle of the letter into a loop, and by the time of the Carolingian minuscule of the 9th century the modern lowercase e, with its small enclosed counter and short crossbar, had taken the form used in print ever since.

E is, by frequency counts of English and most other languages using the Latin alphabet, the single most commonly used letter, which is part of why Morse code assigns it the shortest possible signal, a single dot; that same frequency is also why cryptographers analysing a substitution cipher, including the Theban and Enochian scripts covered elsewhere in this atlas, look first for whichever symbol appears most often in a sample of ordinary text.