H, or h, is the eighth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is aitch (pronounced /ˈeɪtʃ/, plural aitches), or regionally haitch /ˈheɪtʃ/.[1]
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, before coming to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/, still represented a similar sound, the voiceless glottal fricative /h/. 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/.
While Etruscan and Latin had /h/ as a phoneme, 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 an 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, Polish, Slovak, one native word of English, and a few loanwords into English; and /ç/ in German.
For most English speakers, the name for the letter is pronounced as /eɪtʃ/ and spelled "aitch"[1] or occasionally "eitch". The pronunciation /heɪtʃ/ 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] as well as scattered varieties of Edinburgh, England, and Welsh English,[4] and in Australia and Nova Scotia.
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 /heɪtʃ/ 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.[5]