Э

E, from the Alphabet Book оf the Red Army Soldier (1921) E (Э э; italics: Э э or Э э; italics: Э э); also known as backwards ye, from Russian е оборо́тное, ye oborótnoye, [ˈjɛ ɐbɐˈrotnəjə] is a letter found in three Slavic languages: Russian, Belarusian, and West Polesian. It represents the vowels [e] and [ɛ], as the e in the word "editor". In other Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic script, the sounds are represented by Ye (Е е), which in Russian and Belarusian represents [je] in initial and postvocalic position or [e] with palatalization of the preceding consonant. This letter closely resembles and should not be confused with the older Cyrillic letter Ukrainian Ye (Є є), of which Э is a backwards version.

In Cyrillic Moldovan, which was used in the Moldovan SSR during the Soviet Union and is still used in Transnistria, the letter corresponds to ă in the Latin Romanian alphabet, and the phoneme [ə]. It is also used in the Cyrillic alphabets used by Mongolian and many Uralic, Caucasian and Turkic languages of the former Soviet Union.