Aspirated h

In French spelling, aspirated "h" (French: "h" aspiré) is an initial silent letter that represents a hiatus at a word boundary, between the word's first vowel and the preceding word's last vowel. At the same time, the aspirated h stops the normal processes of contraction and liaison from occurring.

The name of the now-silent h refers not to aspiration but to its former pronunciation as the voiceless glottal fricative [h] in Old French and in Middle French.

The following list contains only the dictionary head entries and not all the forms that can be derived from them. For example, it does not contain past participles or transitive verbs when used as adjectives or nouns. It does not include composite words unless the omission might cause confusion among homonyms distinguished only by diacritic signs.

In French dictionaries, words with an initial aspirated h are traditionally prefixed with an asterisk but with no effect on their alphabetical arrangement. The following list is compiled from the Dictionnaire du Trésor de la langue française and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française. It lacks many proper names and recent borrowings. In general, if a borrowed word is pronounced with an [h] in its language of origin, the h will be conserved in French orthography and be aspirated.

Hélas is not aspirated in classical poetry.

That is indicated here by the use of cet rather than ce.

The aspiration of h is often optional in words beginning with hi, and the liaison (with a mute h) is generally accepted, except in recent anglicisms of current usage, interjections or homophones with another word. Beside the very productive and learned Greek root hiéro-, most words are quite recent and of Germanic origin (German, Dutch, Modern English), or the h is lightly pronounced.

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