H
H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet.
History
The Semitic letter ח (Ħêt) probably represented the phoneme /X/ (pharyngeal voiceless fricative) (IPA [ħ]). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence. Early Greek H stood for /h/, but later on Η or η (Êta>/ita/) stood for /E:/. In Modern Greek this phoneme fell together with /i/, similar to the English development where EA /E:/ and EE /e:/ came to be both pronounced /i:/ . In Etruscan and Latin, the sound value /h/ was maintained, but all Romance languages lost the sound - only Romanian borrowed the /h/ phoneme from its neighbouring Slavic languages and Castilian /x/ developed [h] allophones in some Spanish-speaking countries. In German, h is typically used as a vowel lengthener as well as the letter for the phoneme /h/. This may be because /h/ was sometimes lost between vowels in German, but it may also have to do with the fact that Romance lost /h/. Hence, H is used in many spelling systems in digraphs and trigraphs like ch in Spanish, English /tS/, French /S/ from /tS/, Italian /k/, German /x/ etc.
Usage
In reference, it is spelled aitch (or sometimes haitch by speakers of dialects—primarily Irish and Australian—which pronounce an h in the name of the letter itself). The English name aitch /eItS/ or haitch /heItS/ derives from Old French /atS/ > Middle English /a:tS/. /heItS/ is thus a spelling pronunciation based on the sound usually associated with the English letter.
Alternate representations
Hotel represents the letter H in the NATO phonetic alphabet.
In international Morse code the letter H is DitDitDitDit: · · · ·
In Braille the letter H is represented as ⠓ (in Unicode), the dot pattern,
X.
XX
..
Computing
In Unicode the capital H is codepoint U+0048 and the lowercase h is U+0068.
The ASCII code for capital H is 72 and for lowercase h is 104; or in binary 01001000 and 01101000, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital H is 200 and for lowercase h is 136.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "H" and "h" for upper and lower case respectively.
Meanings for H
- In anime (Japanese animation), H is the abbreviation for "hentai"; See also Ecchi.
- In biochemistry, H is the symbol for histidine.
- In chemistry, H is the symbol for hydrogen.
- In computing, ^H is often used jokingly to indicate the intended deletion of the previous letter. This is because some operating systems display ^H when pressing the backspace key if the keyboard is not configured properly.
- In international licence plate codes, H stands for Hungary.
- In mathematics, blackboard bold <math>\mathbb{H}<math> represents the quaternions (after William Rowan Hamilton, <math>\mathbb{Q}<math> representing the rationals).
- In the Metric system,
- In music, H is a note in the German system, corresponding to B natural.
- In physics, h is Planck's constant.
- H is the stage name of Ian Watkins, formerly of the pop group Steps.
- In science fiction fandom and hacker jargon, the infix of an h is a method of "marking" common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way. It is likely to have originated in the fannish catch phrase ?Bheer is the One True Ghod!? from the mid-20th Century. The h infix marking of "Ghod" and other words spread into the 1960s counterculture via underground comics, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three communities overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchmark names (Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix.
See also
ĥ, ħ, Eta
Two-letter combinations starting with H:
