ae

Ae is a two-letter combination that appears in many languages as a digraph and, in some alphabets, as a distinct letter formed by the ligature æ, called ash in English. The term also appears in discussions of typography and computing to refer to this character and its variants.

In writing systems, æ historically functioned as a single unit in several Nordic and Germanic alphabets. In Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, the letter æ is still treated as a separate letter within the alphabet and participates in spelling and collation alongside other vowels. In Old English and early Latin-script contexts, the ligature æ was used to represent a single vowel sound and later became less common as separate letters were adopted in many languages.

Phonetics and pronunciation vary by language. The ligature æ commonly represents a front vowel sound close to [æ] in IPA, the near-open front unrounded vowel found in many dialects of English and Nordic languages. In some languages, the digraph "ae" in plain text may represent two adjacent vowels rather than a single glyph, and its pronunciation can change based on word origin and phonological context.

Orthography and encoding. In modern Unicode text, æ is encoded as U+00E6 (lowercase) and Æ as U+00C6 (uppercase). HTML uses named entities æ and Æ. In environments limited to ASCII, the digraph "ae" is commonly used as an approximation of the æ ligature.

See also: ash, digraphs, ligatures, Unicode, Latin alphabet.