That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word ⟨hit⟩, /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt]. H is the eighth most frequently used letter in the English language (after S, N, I, O, A, T, and E), with a frequency of about 4.2% in words. When h is placed after certain other consonants, it modifies their pronunciation in various ways, e.g. for ch, gh, ph, sh, and th. Other languages
In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen (heighten), the second ⟨h⟩ is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in nearly all instances of ⟨th⟩ in native German words such as thun (to do) or Thür (door). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater (theater) and Thron (throne), which continue to be spelled with ⟨th⟩ even after the last German spelling reform. In Spanish and Portuguese, ⟨h⟩ ("hache" in Spanish, pronounced [atʃe], or agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] (son) and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] (Hungarian). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/.
For example in le homard (the lobster) the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic ⟨h⟩ was added to disambiguate the [v] and semivowel [ɥ] pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩: huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea). In Italian, ⟨h⟩ has no phonological value. Its most important uses are in the digraphs ch /k/ and gh /ɡ/, as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are homophones, for example some present tense forms of the verb avere (to have) (such as hanno, they have, vs. anno, year), and in short interjections (oh, ehi). Some languages, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian use ⟨h⟩ as a breathy voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless /h/ in a voiced environment. In Hungarian, the letter has no fewer than five pronunciations, with three additional uses as a productive and non-productive element of digraphs.