Aitch

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The eighth letter of the English alphabet, written as H ; the breathy consonant sound represented by that letter at the start of words like hat
2. A character that stands for the consonant in the English alphabet ; the rough breathing sound that the letter makes in pronunciation
3. The letter H in the alphabet ; the aspirated sound it produces when spoken before a vowel, as in house

Etymology: The name of the letter H is more tangled than it looks. In English it is "aitch", but for centuries its pronunciation has been unstable: the Middle English form was "ache", borrowed from Old French, and that in turn traces back to a Vulgar Latin form "acca". Where that Latin form came from is not settled, but one leading idea is that it began as a spelled-out sequence of letters. In Late Latin, the letter names "ha" and "ka" may have run together as a pronunciation of the letter H, and "aka" was then whittled down to "acca" once the initial h stopped being sounded. The name is thus a fossil of a time when letters were read aloud as syllables. Its relative "ecchi" is a doublet, a separate English-facing descendant of the same ancestor, which shows the name splitting into more than one form as it travelled through different languages.