E

E, the fifth letter of the Greek, Latin, and modern European alphabets. The symbol represents the Phoenician he, which somewhat resembles an E reversed, and is said to have been derived from a hieroglyph representing a window. In Phoenician he was the rough-breathing, the modern H sound; but the Greeks took it to represent that sound for which it now stands in languages of the Continent of Europe. The letter E is of more frequent occurrence and is more variously sounded than any other in English. It is often mute. This is due partly to the fact that, as in French, the final e was often dropped in the 16th century but still written, and partly to the fact that other words were written with final mute e by false analogy with those in which the symbol had survived the sound. In Music, E is the third note of the scale of C. The E proposition in Logic is the universal negative.