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 /ˈ/ or haitch /ˈh/ plural aitches or haitches)[1] is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.


Egyptian hieroglyph 
Old Semitic
H |




Name in English

For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced /ˈ/ and spelled 'aitch'[1] or occasionally 'eitch'. The pronunciation /ˈh/ and the associated spelling 'haitch' is often considered to be h-adding and is considered nonstandard in England.[2] It is, however, a feature of Hiberno-English[3] 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".


The haitch pronunciation of h has spread in England, being used by approximately 24% of English people born since 1982[5] 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 in England, although the pronunciation with /h/ is also attested as a legitimate variant.[2]


Use in writing systems


In English, h occurs as a single-letter grapheme (being either silent or representing /h/) and in various digraphs, such as ch //, /ʃ/, /k/, or /x/), gh (silent, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, or /f/), ph (/f/), rh (/r/), sh (/ʃ/), th (/θ/ or /ð/), wh (/hw/[7]). 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 historian", 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 /r/ 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).


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 /f/, 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 (IPA), it is used mainly for the so-called aspirations (fricative or thrills), and variations of the plain 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 (or thrill). With a bar, minuscule ħ is used for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Specific to the IPA, a hooked ɦ is used for a voiced glottal fricative, and a superscript ʰ is used to represent aspiration.

Ancestors, siblings and descendants in other alphabets

Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations

Computing codes

Character H h
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 72 U+0048 104 U+0068
UTF-8 72 48 104 68
EBCDIC family 200 C8 136 88
ASCII 1 72 48 104 68


Other representations

See also


  1. 1 2 "H" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "aitch", op. cit.
  2. 1 2 "'Haitch' or 'aitch'? How do you pronounce 'H'?". BBC News. Retrieved 3 September 2016.
  3. Dolan, T. P. (1 January 2004). "A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English". Gill & Macmillan Ltd. Retrieved 3 September 2016 via Google Books.
  5. John C Wells, Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, page 360, Pearson, Harlow, 2008
  7. In many dialects, /hw/ and /w/ have merged
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article H.