The Illuminated Letter "E"

Illuminated letter "E" with berries and leaves.

Illuminated letter "E" as a peacock!

Tiny illuminated capital "E" for your collections.

Additional Illuminated letter "E"s will be uploaded here in the future. Please read the Terms of Use for images found on this page. All letters are restored and sometimes redrawn by Kathy Grimm.

E (named e /ˈiː/, plural ees) is the 5th letter and the second vowel in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is the most commonly used letter in many languages, including: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Latin, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

The letter "E" in other languages.

       The Latin letter 'E' differs little from its derivational source, the Greek letter epsilon, 'Œï'. In etymology, the Semitic h√™  has been suggested to have started as a praying or calling human figure (hillul 'jubilation'), and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words); in Greek, h√™ diverged into epsilon, having the value /e/, and eta, having the value /e:/ in classical Greek and /i:/ in modern Greek. Etruscans and Romans followed this usage.
       Although Middle English spelling used ⟨e⟩ to represent long and short /e/, the Great Vowel Shift changed long /eː/ (as in 'me' or 'bee') to /iː/ while short /e/ (as in 'met' or 'bed') remained a mid vowel.
       '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. In the story The Gold Bug by Edgar Allan Poe, a character figures out a random character code by remembering that the most used letter in English is E. 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 supposedly "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. Read more . . .