Words with H

History of the letter H

Its origins can be traced back to the Semitic letter "ḥeth," which initially represented a fence or court. Moving through the Phoenician alphabet as "het," it eventually evolved into the Greek letter "eta." However, the Etruscans and Romans adopted it into their alphabets with a shape and sound more akin to the modern "H," signifying a breathy voiced glottal fricative. In contemporary English, "H" is pronounced by expelling breath through a slightly opened vocal tract, producing the characteristic unvoiced sound as heard in words like "hat" and "happy." Notably, "H" can also be silent, as seen in words such as "honor" and "hour," showcasing its versatile presence in pronunciation. Beyond phonetics, "H" holds varied significance across different fields: in chemistry, it represents hydrogen, the most abundant chemical substance in the Universe; in physics, "ħ" (h-bar) symbolizes the reduced Planck constant, a fundamental constant in quantum mechanics; and, in systematics, "H" often denotes the genus Homo, to which humans belong. This breadth of application highlights "H"'s embeddedness not only in linguistic constructs but also within scientific and intellectual discourse.

Words that start with H