E, the Sütterlin letter e
E is the 5th letter of the German alphabet, representing the most frequent sound in the German language, representing both the close-mid front unrounded vowel /eː/ and the open-mid /ɛ/, as well as the unstressed schwa /ə/. In Sütterlinschrift, it was redesigned in 1911 by Ludwig Sütterlin with upright, geometric proportions for German schoolchildren.
In words
Mutter · mother
Vater · father
Liebe · love; dear
Easy to confuse with
Looks like n (Sütterlin n)
The e is joined at the top and the n at the bottom: two short strokes linked across their tops are an e, linked across their feet an n.
Looks like u (Sütterlin u)
The u is joined at the bottom and carries a small arc above it; the e is joined at the top and has no arc.
History
The letter E is the 5th letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents the most frequent sound in the German language, representing both the close-mid front unrounded vowel /eː/ and the open-mid /ɛ/, as well as the unstressed schwa /ə/.
Sütterlin lowercase e maintains the historic two-stroke structure of Kurrent, but places the two vertical downstrokes upright with clear, equal spacing and a clean join at the top edge of the middle zone. Capital E is drawn with two rounded, stacked lobes resembling a reverse numeral 3.
As the most common letter in German, e appears in nearly every line of handwritten records. Furthermore, lowercase e is the direct historical origin of the German umlaut: scribes in the early modern period wrote a tiny cursive e over vowels (aͤ, oͤ, uͤ), which over centuries gradually simplified into the two modern umlaut dots (ä, ö, ü).
In Phoenician the sign, a heavily abstracted figure of a person, was called he.[1] The Greeks changed its sound value when they took it over, because their language was rich in vowels.[2]
Sources
- [1] E — Wikipedia (German) — Phoenician he (accessed 2026-10-14)
- [2] E — Wikipedia (German) — Greek changed the value, a language rich in vowels (accessed 2026-10-14)