E as a Graphic Form

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.