Gw mau tau Di bahasa Rusia modern dari E (Kiril)

In the specimens of the civil script presented to Peter I in 1708, forms of  were included among forms of , but the latter was deleted by Peter. The former was used in some early 18th-century Russian texts, but some authorities of the period considered it superfluous, like Mikhail Lomonosov, on the grounds that "the letter Е, having several different pronunciations, could serve in the pronoun  and the interjection " and that it was inappropriate to introduce letters solely for use in loanwords. However, the inclusion of  in its modern function, in the Russian Academy's Dictionary of 1789–94, marks the point from which it can be considered as an established part of the Russian orthographical standard.

There were still some objections to the letter even as late as 1817, when M. T. Kačenovskij was questioning whether "yet another hard э" was necessary when the language already had "a soft ѣ and a hard е".

In contemporary Russian,  is used to represent ,  in initial position ( 'electricity') and postvocalic position ( 'duel'). Among such words are only a few native Russian roots:  (это 'this is', этот/эта/это 'this (m./f./n.)', эти 'these', поэтому 'thus' etc.),  (экий 'what a'), / (эдак/этак 'that way', эдакий/этакий 'sort of') and a few interjections like  'hey',  'uh, oh',  'uh'.

Even though Russian contains a significant number of loanwords in which  occurs after a hard (unpalatalised) consonant, it is still the practice to use the letter  for , :  (tennis, sepsis). There are few traditional exceptions to that practice among common noun loanwords:

the original list (the first half of the 20th century) contained just three words: