Use in English
⟨E⟩ is the most common (or highest frequency) letter in the English alphabet (starting off the typographer's phrase ETAOIN SHRDLU) and several other European languages, which has implications in both cryptography and data compression. This makes it a hard and popular letter to use when writing lipograms. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) is considered a "dreadful" novel, and that "at least part of Wright's narrative issues were caused by language limitations imposed by the lack of E." Both Georges Perec's novel A Void (La Disparition) (1969) and its English translation by Gilbert Adair omit ⟨e⟩ and are considered better works. 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 English, the salient phenomenon silent e's, although arising from old inflections that have been dropped, still retain a function as they indicate that certain vowels in the word are long vowels (for example rat has a short vowel and rate has a long one).
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Famous quotes containing the word english:
“The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, “All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.” And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)