ΩGreek Alphabet

About this tool

Every letter from alpha to omega appears as a card with its capital and small form, its English name and pronunciation, the Latin letters it's usually transliterated as, and what it commonly stands for in maths, science and engineering. Click a letter to copy it, or search by name or use, such as "sum" or "wavelength".

The Greek alphabet and its uses

The Greek alphabet, in use since around the 8th century BC, was the first to write vowels as separate letters, and it's the ancestor of the Latin alphabet used for English and of the Cyrillic alphabet. It has 24 letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi and omega. Outside Greece, the letters are everywhere in technical writing because they provide extra symbols that won't be confused with ordinary variables. π is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, Σ means "add these up", Δ means a change in a quantity, μ is the prefix micro- and the mean of a population, σ is standard deviation, λ is wavelength, θ is a common angle, Ω is the ohm and φ is the golden ratio. Greek letters also name fraternities and sororities, stars in constellations such as Alpha Centauri, and, more recently, virus variants. Lower-case sigma has a second form, ς, used only at the end of a word. The pronunciations given are the usual English ones; in Modern Greek, beta sounds like "v", delta like the "th" in "this" and several vowels have changed. The symbols tool, the NATO phonetic alphabet and the Unicode inspector are related.

Frequently asked questions