• eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, sixth consonant
  • phonetic name: "voiceless glottal fricative"; sound: imagine your hands are cold and blow on them to warm them up
  • Egyptian hieroglyphs included a courtyard within a house, a reed hut, a rope made of woven flax, a cow udder/stomach with tail, or a sieve
  • Semitic symbol, heth, stood for a wall, fence, field or enclosure (with two, three or four crossbars)
  • Greeks rotated heth ninety degrees and adopted it as their consonant eta (uppercase Η, lowercase η), but later represented a long vowel (also, Theta: uppercase Θ, lowercase θ or ϑ)
  • in Roman, 'H' represents 200
  • for most of its history, 'H' has held the same position (the eighth letter) in the Semitic, Greek, Etruscan, and Latin alphabets
  • 'H' has an anomalous name, "aitch"; it may have derived from the Old French name "hache" circa 800 A.D.
  • the sound of 'H' (exhaling) involves essentially no pronunciation, and for that reason has had its validity debated by grammarians for centuries; in 1529, French Renaissance scholar rounded out the debate and said this about 'H', "The aspirate is not a letter; nonetheless, it is by poetic license given the place of a letter."
  • 'H' can be silent/faded at the beginning (i.e. hour, honest) or followed by a 'g' (i.e. ghost, ghetto, etc.)
  • many 'H' pairings (i.e. GH, SH, WH, CH) were created in the Middle Ages
  • 'H' nouns get treated like a vowel when spoken (i.e. correct print form is "a historian"; common pronunciation is "an historian")
  • 'H' is common in the friendly salutations "Hi! Hello! Hola! Howdy! How are you?!"
  • associated with stability, construction and columns
  • when Greeks changed composition from horizontal to vertical, the sign no longer represented obstacle but rather elevation; 'H' unites heaven and earth
  • 'H' is similar to 'B' in a couple ways: they both shared same hieroglyph (courtyard), and they have very similar uppercase (H vs. B) and lower case (h vs. b) characters
  • the shape of capital 'H' imparts great stability and groundedness
  • 'H' in chemistry is hydrogen: the first on the periodic table, the lightest element, and the most abundant in the universe (about 90%); also, H-bomb
  • 'H' in physics is henry, the SI unit for electrical inductance
  • 'H', in upper or lower case, can represent 'hour' (i.e. km/h), 'height' (i.e. V = L·W·H) or 'hospital'
  • 'H' can stand for the drug heroin
  • 'H' in Preparation H is hemorrhoid
  • NATO phonetic alphabet: HOTEL
  • 'H-beam' is a metal construction beam with an H-shaped cross section
  • in French, 'H' can mean zero; l'heure 'h' = "zero hour"
  • H can also abbreviate harbour, hard, high, hour, hundred, Hungary, husband