Hn.

a. The eighth letter of the Roman alphabet, ancient and modern, representing historically the Semitic ?, Hheth or Kheth, through the Greek H, Heta, Eta, originally the eighth, but, in the later Greek alphabet, after the omission of ϝ (see F n.), the seventh letter. The Semitic letter represented a laryngal or guttural spirant, or a rough aspirate, and it was with the aspirate value that the letter was originally used in Greek and passed thence into Roman use. (In the later Greek alphabet, H was used as a vowel, to express long ē, which had previously not been distinguished from short e: see E.) When the Roman alphabet was applied to the Germanic languages, H was used initially for the simple aspirate or breath-sound, which had arisen out of a pre-Germanic or Aryan k, through the stages of guttural aspirate /kh/, and guttural spirant /x/; medially and finally h was put for the guttural spirant itself, which, in later times, came to be written gh or ch: thus, Gothic hauh, Old High German hôh, Old English héah, modern English high (gh mute), Scotch heich, German hoch. In Old English, h occurred not only before the vowels, but also before the consonants l, n, r, w (representing the pre-Germanic kl-, kn-, kr-, kw-, or q-), as in hláf loaf, hnecca neck, hræfn raven, hwá who; it now stands initially only before vowels. Its power is that of a simple aspiration or breathing, with just sufficient narrowing of the glottis to be audible before a vowel. It is also used to form consonantal digraphs (sh, th, etc.) with simple sounds; and it is often silent, or merely lengthens a preceding vowel.The name aitch, which is now so remote from any connection with the sound, goes back through Middle English ache to Old French ache = Spanish ache, Italian acca, pointing to a late Latin *accha, *ahha, or *aha, exemplifying the sound; cf. Italian effe, elle, emme, etc. (The earlier Latin name was ha.) The plural occurs as aitches, aches, hs, h's.In late Latin, and in the Romanic languages, the aspirate was no longer pronounced, and consequently often not written; in modern Italian it is entirely omitted, as in eretico, istorico, orribile. In Old French similarly the mute h was originally not written, and it was in this form that many Old French words, such as abit, able, eir, erbe, eritage, onest, onor or onur, ure or oure, ympne, were originally adopted in English. From this stage we derive the still existing forms able, ability, arbour (= erbere), ostler. But at a later period, imitation of the Latin spelling, by scribes who knew that language, gradually led to the restitution of h in the writing of most of these words in French, and thence also in English. In French, the h, though thus artificially reinstated in spelling, remained mute; but in England it was gradually, after the usage of the native words, restored in pronunciation, so that at the present day only a very few words, viz. heir, honest, honour, hour, with their derivatives, remain with h mute; though others, such as herb, humble, humour, were so treated very recently, and are by some people still; and hostler (also spelt ostler) is so pronounced by the majority. A trace of the former muteness or weakness of h in other words is also seen in the still prevalent practice of using an before words with initial h, not accented on the first syllable, as heretical, historical, humane, hypotenuse, and in such archaic forms as ‘mine host’, and the biblical ‘an Hebrew’. In the Middle English period, during which h was being gradually reinstated in words from Old French, these show great variety of spelling, the same word appearing now with, and now without h; this uncertainty reacted upon other words beginning with a vowel, so that these also often received an initial h (due probably in some instances, as habundant, to a mistaken notion of their etymology). This spelling has been permanently established in the words hermit and hostage, among others.In Old English, as in the Teutonic languages generally, initial h was strongly and distinctly aspirated. But early in the Middle-English period it was dropped in pronunciation and writing before l, n, and r. The old hw was from the 12th cent. commonly written wh, sometimes w only, in Scotch qwh-, quh-; indicating a variety of pronunciation (see W n. and wh n.). Before vowels, in words of Old English or Norse origin, h has been regularly retained in the standard spelling and pronunciation: but in many English dialects, especially those of the midl. and southern counties (not in Scotland, Ireland, or in the United States), the aspirate has disappeared as an ordinary etymological element, and is now employed only with other functions, viz. to avoid hiatus (e.g. the egg, pronounced the-h-egg), and especially in the emphatic or energetic utterance of a syllable with an initial vowel; being then prefixed without distinction to words with or without etymological h; thus horse, ass, usually òss, àss, emphatically (or after a vowel) hòss, hàss. In earlier periods, these dialectal habits naturally affected the written language of literature, where their influence was reinforced by the uncertainty that prevailed as to initial h in words of Latin-French origin; so that during the Middle-English period, and down to the 17th cent., we find numerous instances of the non-etymological absence or (more often) presence of initial h in native words also. These characteristics are not confined to English: some modern Dutch and Flemish dialects, especially those of Zealand, Flanders, and North Brabant, have entirely lost h as an etymological element, and employ it to avoid hiatus, and to impart emphasis, exactly like the English dialects; while in Old High German, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, and, above all, Middle Flemish literature, the non-etymological absence and presence of initial h is even more marked than in Middle English. In this Dictionary, some of the chief forms found in earlier use with adventitious initial h are mentioned in their alphabetical order, with a reference to their proper spelling, especially when this is not seen by simple omission of the h; but in other cases it is to be presumed that, when a Middle English word in h is not entered here, it will be found in the form without h.In recent times, the correct treatment of initial h in speech has come to be regarded as a kind of shibboleth of social position; this has resulted in the cultivation of the educated usage in many quarters where it is not native. But even in educated pronunciation, there are cases in which h is usually mute, e.g. at the beginning of a syllable after certain consonant groups, as in exhaust, exhortation, and in such suffixes as -ham, -hope, in Chatham, Clapham, Durham, Greenhope, Stanhope, Tudhope, -herd in shepherd, as well as in the pronouns he, his, him, her, when unemphatic and as it were enclitically combined with the preceding word, as in ‘I met-him on-his horse’. In the corresponding neuter pronoun it, originally hit, in which the unemphatic use predominates, the h was long ago dropped in writing as well as speech. (But in Scotch the emphatic form is still hit.)After a vowel, h is regularly silent, and such a vowel being usually long, as in oh, ah, bah, hurrah, the addition of h (so usual in modern German) is one of the expedients which we have for indicating a long vowel in foreign or dialect words. The silence of h in certain positions contributed to the currency of such spellings as the obsolete preheminence, proheme, abhominable.By the combination of h with consonants, numerous digraphs are formed for the expression of simple sounds; the origin of this goes back to the ancient Greek alphabet, which used PH, TH, KH, for the aspirated consonants, which were afterwards provided with single symbols Φ, Θ, Χ, and sank into simple spirants. In Latin the digraphs were retained, and thence th, ch, and occasionally ph, were taken to represent German spirants or aspirates. In Old English, which had þ, ð, for the sound or sounds represented on the continent by th, these digraphs had little currency until after the Norman Conquest, which introduced th, ch, gh, and sometimes yh, for certain English sounds, and substituted wh for Old English hw (see further wh n.); the development of a simple sound /ʃ/ from the Old English combination sc, led, through sch, to the digraph sh; ph and rh (pronounced f and r) were adopted from Latin as the representatives of Greek ϕ and ῥ; in more recent times kh has been used to express Slavonic and Semitic guttural spirants; bh, dh, gh, ph, th, kh, to represent Sanskrit and Indian aspirates, or other alien sounds; and zh (on the analogy, s : z : : sh : zh) for the phonetic representation of French j in déjeuner, symbolized in this Dictionary by /ʒ/. (For the history and use of these digraphs, see under their respective initial letters, C, G, etc.) to drop one's h's: = to drop one's aitches at aitch n. Phrases.

b. with reference to the shape of the capital H.

b. Designation of a strong Fraunhofer line at 3969 Å, caused by calcium ions; (originally) †(the position occupied by) the H and K lines as a pair. [Named by J. Fraunhofer 1817, in Ann. d. Physik LVI. 286.]