H

H is the eighth letter of the modern English alphabet and of the Latin alphabet from which it descends. Its earliest ancestor is the Semitic letter heth, found in the North Semitic and Phoenician scripts of the late second millennium BCE. Heth stood for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, a breathy sound made deep in the throat that survives in Arabic ḥāʾ and Hebrew ḥet. Its early form looked like a ladder or a fence with two or three crossbars, and some scholars connect it with an older sign for an enclosure, though that link is uncertain.

The Greeks took heth into their alphabet as eta (Η). In several early Greek dialects, including those of Attica and the western colonies, the letter kept a consonant value close to /h/. In East Ionic, however, the h sound had largely disappeared from speech, so the letter was reused for a long open e. When Athens officially adopted the Ionic alphabet in 403–402 BCE, the vowel value became standard, and it survives in modern Greek, where eta is now pronounced /i/. Greek scribes later marked the lost h with the rough breathing, a small sign that developed from the left half of the old letter.

The western Greek form reached Italy, where first the Etruscans and then the Romans used H for /h/. Latin speakers began dropping the sound early. In the first century BCE the poet Catullus mocked a man named Arrius for saying chommoda and hinsidias, adding h sounds where they did not belong in an effort to sound refined. In the Romance languages that grew from spoken Latin, the sound vanished. Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese still write h, but they do not pronounce it. Italian keeps it mainly in ho, hai, ha and hanno and in ch and gh, where it marks a hard consonant. Spanish h often replaces a Latin f, as in hacer from facere. French separates a silent h muet (l’homme) from an h aspiré (le héros), equally silent but blocking elision.

English inherited both habits. Native words such as house, hand and heart kept a spoken h, while many French borrowings arrived without one, which is why hour, honest and heir begin with a vowel sound. Herb is silent in most American speech but pronounced in British English. H also builds several digraphs: ch, sh, th, wh, gh and ph. The letter’s name, usually spelled aitch, comes from Old French ache. The variant haitch is common in Ireland and Australia. In England, dropping the h at the start of words, as in Cockney speech, has long been treated as a marker of social class.

In Indonesian spelling, h stands for a breathy /h/ at the start, middle or end of a word, as in hari, tahu and rumah. The 1972 spelling reform known as Ejaan yang Disempurnakan replaced the old digraph ch with kh, so achir became akhir. Outside language, H is the chemical symbol for hydrogen, and in German music notation it names the note that English speakers call B natural.