Ë
Ë (lowercase ë) is a Latin letter consisting of the letter E with two dots, called a diaeresis, placed above it. In Unicode it is encoded as U+00CB LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS, with the lowercase form at U+00EB.1 In some languages, notably Albanian, it is a letter of the alphabet in its own right; in others, such as French and Dutch, it is a variant of E that signals how the vowel is to be pronounced.1
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Code points | U+00CB (Ë) and U+00EB (ë), Latin-1 Supplement block, added in Unicode 1.1 (1993)1 |
| Canonical decomposition | E + U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS; UTF-8 encoding C3 8B; HTML entity Ë1 |
| Alphabet letter | A letter of the Albanian, Kashubian, Emilian, Romagnol, Ladin, and Lenape alphabets1 |
| Variant of E | Appears in Acehnese, Afrikaans, Belarusian, Breton, Dutch, English, Filipino, French, Luxembourgish, Piedmontese, Russian, and dialects of Neapolitan1 |
| Encoding note | The diaeresis is not distinguished from the umlaut in the Unicode character encoding2 |
| Collation | CLDR's German EOR tailoring, based on European Standard EN 13710:2011-06 Annex E.4, treats the umlaut as distinct from the trema (diaeresis)3 |
Encoding
Ë is a precomposed character in the Latin-1 Supplement block, which Unicode follows from ISO/IEC 8859-1 for Latin letters up to U+00FF.1 Its canonical decomposition maps it to the plain letter E followed by U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, so the same visual result can be written either as the single precomposed code point or as a combining sequence.1 The character is an uppercase letter, is written left to right, and is not mirrored in bidirectional text.1
The two dots over Ë can represent two different linguistic phenomena. A diaeresis (also called a trema) indicates that the vowel is pronounced separately from the one before it, while an umlaut marks a changed vowel quality. Although the terms are not interchangeable, the diaeresis is not distinguished from the umlaut in the Unicode character encoding; both share the same code points.2 Sorting behavior can still differ by language: the CLDR collation tailoring for German based on EN 13710 Annex E.4 states that the umlaut is treated as distinct from the trema and that the umlaut is the diacritic taken into account before all others.3
Use in languages
Albanian. Ë is a letter of the Albanian alphabet, one of the languages in which it functions as an independent letter rather than a marked variant of E.1
French. In French, ë indicates that the E should be pronounced separately from the preceding vowel, as in Noël.4
Dutch. Dutch uses the e-diaeresis to mark a syllable break in vowel clusters that would otherwise be read as a single vowel or diphthong, producing words with consecutive dotted letters such as feeën, ideeën, and tweeëntwintig.5
English. The diaeresis appears occasionally in English, in borrowed words such as naïve and Noël and in names such as Brontë, where it shows that the final E is not silent.4 English publications have also used it to separate adjacent vowels in words like coöperate and reënact, but this usage has become very rare since the 1940s.6
References
- U+00CB Latin Capital Letter E with Diaeresis, Codepoints
- Unicode Glossary
- CLDR collation/de.xml, unicode-org on GitHub
- U+00CB "Ë" Latin Capital Letter E with Diaeresis, Unicode Character
- Version 9.0.0 (draft), UAX #14 line breaking proposal, Unicode
- Diaeresis, Fact Archive Encyclopedia
Topic: Encyclopedia › Society and history › Languages and linguistics › Writing and notation systems › Latin script
Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
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