H

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see H (disambiguation).

"Aitch" redirects here. For the surname, see Aitch (surname).

Writing cursive forms of H

H (named aitch /ˈeɪtʃ/ or haitch /ˈheɪtʃ/ in Ireland and parts of Australia; plural aitches or haitches) is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History

Egyptian hieroglyph  fence	Old Semitic ħ	Phoenician hetht	Greek heta	Etruscan H |	Latin H

The original Semitic letter Heth most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts.

The Greek eta 'Η' in Archaic Greek alphabets still represented /h/ (later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/). In this context the letter eta is also known as heta to underline this fact. Thus, in the Old Italic alphabets the letter heta of the Euboean alphabet was adopted with its original sound value /h/.

Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme but almost all Romance languages lost the sound—Romanian later re-borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages, and Spanish developed a secondary /h/ from /f/, before losing it again; various Spanish dialects have developed [h] as allophone of /s/ or /x/ in most Spanish-speaking countries, and various dialects of Portuguese use it as an allophone of /ʀ/. 'H' is also used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs, such as 'ch' which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish, Galician, Old Portuguese and English, /ʃ/ in French and modern Portuguese, /k/ in Italian, French and English, /x/ in German, Czech language, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English and a few loanwords into English, and /ç/ in German.

Name in English

In most dialects of English, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/ and spelled 'aitch' or occasionally 'eitch'. The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ and the associated spelling 'haitch' is often considered to be h-adding and hence nonstandard. It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English and other varieties of English, such as those of Malaysia, India, Newfoundland, and Singapore. In Northern Ireland it is a shibboleth as Protestant schools teach aitch and Catholics haitch. In the Republic of Ireland, the letter h is generally pronounced as "haitch". In Australia, this has also been attributed to Catholic school teaching and is estimated to be in use by 60% of the population.

The perceived name of the letter affects the choice of indefinite article before initialisms beginning with H: for example "an H-bomb" or "a H-bomb". The pronunciation /ˈheɪtʃ/ may be a hypercorrection formed by analogy with the names of the other letters of the alphabet, most of which include the sound they represent.

The non-standard haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982 and polls continue to show this pronunciation becoming more common among younger native speakers. Despite this increasing number, pronunciation without the /h/ sound is still considered to be standard, although the non-standard pronunciation is also attested as a legitimate variant.

Authorities disagree about the history of the letter's name. The Oxford English Dictionary says the original name of the letter was [ˈaha] in Latin; this became [ˈaka] in Vulgar Latin, passed into English via Old French [ˈatʃ], and by Middle English was pronounced [ˈaːtʃ]. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language derives it from French hache from Latin haca or hic. Anatoly Liberman suggests a conflation of two obsolete orderings of the alphabet, one with H immediately followed by K and the other without any K: reciting the former's ..., H, K, L,... as [...(h)a ka el ...] when reinterpreted for the latter ..., H, L,... would imply a pronunciation [(h)a ka] for H.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, ⟨h⟩ occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/ and in various digraphs, such as ⟨ch⟩ /tʃ/, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), ⟨gh⟩ (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), ⟨ph⟩ (/f/), ⟨rh⟩ (/r/), ⟨sh⟩ (/ʃ/), ⟨th⟩ (/θ/ or /ð/), ⟨wh⟩ (/hw/). The letter is silent in a syllable rime, as in ah, ohm, dahlia, cheetah, pooh-poohed, as well as in certain other words (mostly of French origin) such as hour, honest, herb (in American but not British English) and vehicle. Initial /h/ is often not pronounced in the weak form of some function words including had, has, have, he, her, him, his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales) it is often omitted in all words (see '⟨h⟩'-dropping). It was formerly common for an rather than a to be used as the indefinite article before a word beginning with /h/ in an unstressed syllable, as in "an hat", but use of a is now more usual (see English articles: Indefinite article).

Other languages

In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen ('heighten'), only the first ⟨h⟩ represents /h/. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in nearly all instances of ⟨th⟩ in native German words such as thun ('to do') or Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater ('theater') and Thron ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with ⟨th⟩ even after the last German spelling reform.

In Spanish and Portuguese, ⟨h⟩ ("hache" in Spanish, agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] ('son') and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/. It is sometimes pronounced, with the value [h], in some regions of Andalusia, Extremadura, Canarias, Cantabria and the Americas in the beginning of some words. ⟨h⟩ also appears in the digraph ⟨ch⟩, which represents /tʃ/ in Spanish and northern Portugal, and /ʃ/ in oral traditions that merged both sounds (the latter originarily represented by ⟨x⟩ instead) e.g. in most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish-speaking places, prominently Chile, as well as ⟨nh⟩ /ɲ/ and ⟨lh⟩ /ʎ/ in Portuguese, whose spelling is inherited from Occitan.

In French, the name of the letter is pronounced /aʃ/. The French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The H muet, or "mute" ⟨h⟩, is considered as though the letter were not there at all, so for example the singular definite article le or la, which is elided to l' before a vowel, elides before an H muet followed by a vowel. For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of ⟨h⟩ is called h aspiré ("aspirated '⟨h⟩'", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic ⟨h⟩ was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).

In Italian, ⟨h⟩ has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs 'ch' /k/ and 'gh' /ɡ/, as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere ('to have') (such as hanno, 'they have', vs. anno, 'year'), and in short interjections (oh, ehi).

Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Finnish, use ⟨h⟩ as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment.

In Ukrainian and Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, ⟨h⟩ is also commonly used for /ɦ/, which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter ⟨г⟩.

In Irish, ⟨h⟩ is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words, however ⟨h⟩ placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates lenition of that consonant; ⟨h⟩ began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.

In most dialects of Polish, both ⟨h⟩ and the digraph ⟨ch⟩ always represent /x/.

Other systems

As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, variations of the letter are used to represent two sounds. The lowercase form ⟨h⟩ represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form ⟨ʜ⟩ represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative. A superscript ⟨ʰ⟩ is used to represent aspiration.

Other uses

H is the symbol for the henry, the SI derived unit of inductance.

The chemical symbol of hydrogen is H.

The Heaviside step function is usually denoted by H.

The symbol of the Higgs boson is H⁰.

The Planck constant is denoted by h.

The h-index is used to measure the impact of scientists.

Related characters

• 𐤇 : Semitic letter Heth, from which the following symbols originally derive
• Η η : Greek letter Eta, from which H derives
• Һ һ : Cyrillic letter Shha, which derives from H
• h : Planck constant
• ℏ : reduced Planck constant
• IPA-specific symbols related to H: ɦ ʰ
• H with diacritics: Ĥ ĥ Ħ ħ Ḩ ḩ ẖ ẖ Ḥ ḥ Ḣ ḣ

Computing codes

Character	H		h
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H		LATIN SMALL LETTER H
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	72	U+0048	104	U+0068
UTF-8	72	48	104	68
Numeric character reference	H	H	h	h
EBCDIC family	200	C8	136	88
ASCII 1	72	48	104	68

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
Hotel	····

Signal flag	Flag semaphore	Braille dots-125

See also

• American Sign Language grammar
• List of hieroglyphs/H

External links

• Media related to H at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of H at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of h at Wiktionary
• Lubliner, Coby. 2008. "The Story of H." (essay on origins and uses of the letter "h")