Aspirated h

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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.^[1]

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