A word? Well, it was voted “word of the year” by the American Dialect Society in 1998, because it was becoming increasingly used in such expressions as email and e-business – “e” being short for electronic. But for most of us, e is just a letter – though in English an especially interesting one. I’m reminded of this because this article is being published in September – along with December, a month in which “e”s predominate. It’s the letter we see most often, mainly because it’s used in the two most common words in the language: the and be. As a result, it’s not too difficult to construct a univocalic – a piece of writing in which just one vowel is used throughout. The pastime appealed greatly to the Victorians, and wordplay competitions still go in for it. The American writer CC Bombaugh published a collection of linguistic oddities in 1871. This is the opening of the e-poem: