Eñe

Eñe is the name used in Spanish for the letter Ñ, a distinct character in the Spanish alphabet. It represents a palatal nasal sound, phonemically written as /ɲ/ in many Spanish dialects, similar to the "ny" in canyon. The lowercase and uppercase forms are ñ and Ñ, respectively, each formed by an N with a tilde.

Origin and classification: The letter originated in medieval Iberian writing as a way to abbreviate a doubled n (nn) to indicate the palatal nasal. Over time, ñ came to be treated as a separate letter within the Spanish alphabet. In modern orthography, ñ is recognized as a separate letter after n, while digraphs such as ch and ll are no longer treated as independent letters. The symbol is widely used in Spanish and in other languages that adopt the Latin script, including Galician and various loanwords in other languages.

Usage and examples: Ñ appears in numerous common Spanish words, such as señor, año, in Spanish-language names, and in many borrowed terms. Its presence is a hallmark of proper spelling in Spanish-speaking contexts and is encoded differently from a plain n in digital text. The pronunciation can vary by dialect but generally corresponds to the palatal nasal sound.

Computer encoding and typography: In Unicode, Ñ is U+00D1 and ñ is U+00F1. In HTML, they can be written as Ñ and ñ. In UTF-8, these characters are represented by the byte sequences C3 91 (Ñ) and C3 B1 (ñ). Proper rendering depends on font support and correct text encoding in software and websites.