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Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC.[3][4] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet,[5] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.

Greek alphabet

c. 800 BC – present[1][2]

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Greek

Grek (200), ​Greek

Greek

The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:


The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.[6] Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis.


Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.

The ;

Etruscan alphabet

The , together with various other ancient scripts in Italy, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC, via Etruscan;

Latin alphabet

The , devised in the 4th century AD to write the Gothic language, based on a combination of Greek and Latin uncial models;[50]

Gothic alphabet

The , devised in the 9th century AD for writing Old Church Slavonic;

Glagolitic alphabet

The , which replaced the Glagolitic alphabet shortly afterwards.

Cyrillic script

The used for writing the Coptic language.

Coptic Alphabet

The Greek alphabet was the model for various others:[6]


The Armenian and Georgian alphabets are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.[51]

Other uses

Use for other languages

Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages.[52] For some of them, additional letters were introduced.

The symbol ϐ ("curled beta") is a cursive variant form of (β). In the French tradition of Ancient Greek typography, β is used word-initially, and ϐ is used word-internally.

beta

The letter has a form resembling a cursive capital letter D; while not encoded as its own form, this form is included as part of the symbol for the drachma (a Δρ digraph) in the Currency Symbols block, at U+20AF (₯).

delta

The letter can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped ('lunate epsilon', like a semicircle with a stroke) or (similar to a reversed number 3). The symbol ϵ (U+03F5) is designated specifically for the lunate form, used as a technical symbol.

epsilon

The symbol ϑ ("script theta") is a cursive form of (θ), frequent in handwriting, and used with a specialized meaning as a technical symbol.

theta

The symbol ϰ ("kappa symbol") is a cursive form of (κ), used as a technical symbol.

kappa

The symbol ϖ ("variant pi") is an archaic script form of (π), also used as a technical symbol.

pi

The letter (ρ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the descending tail either going straight down or curled to the right. The symbol ϱ (U+03F1) is designated specifically for the curled form, used as a technical symbol.

rho

The letter , in standard orthography, has two variants: ς, used only at the ends of words, and σ, used elsewhere. The form ϲ ("lunate sigma", resembling a Latin c) is a medieval stylistic variant that can be used in both environments without the final/non-final distinction.

sigma

The capital letter (Υ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the upper strokes either straight like a Latin Y, or slightly curled. The symbol ϒ (U+03D2) is designated specifically for the curled form (), used as a technical symbol, e.g. in physics.

upsilon

The letter can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped as (a circle with a vertical stroke through it) or as (a curled shape open at the top). The symbol ϕ (U+03D5) is designated specifically for the closed form, used as a technical symbol.

phi

The letter has at least three stylistic variants of its capital form. The standard is the "open omega" (Ω), resembling an open partial circle with the opening downward and the ends curled outward. The two other stylistic variants are seen more often in modern typography, resembling a raised and underscored circle (roughly o̲), where the underscore may or may not be touching the circle on a tangent (in the former case it resembles a superscript omicron similar to that found in the numero sign or masculine ordinal indicator; in the latter, it closely resembles some forms of the Latin letter Q). The open omega is always used in symbolic settings and is encoded in Letterlike Symbols (U+2126) as a separate code point for backward compatibility.

omega

Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in Unicode.

Greek Font Society

Greek ligatures

Palamedes

Romanization of Greek

character list in Unicode

Greek and Coptic

—including Greek and Coptic letters, sorted by shape

Unicode collation charts

Examples of Greek handwriting

at archive.today (archived August 5, 2012)

Greek Unicode Issues (Nick Nicholas)

Unicode FAQ – Greek Language and Script

(Alan Wood)

alphabetic test for Greek Unicode range

numeric test for Greek Unicode range

a browser-based tool

Classical Greek keyboard

a collection of free fonts by Greek Font Society

GFS Typefaces