Greek and Coptic: Ancient Alphabets in Unicode
The Greek alphabet is one of the most influential writing systems in human history—the ancestor of Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Gothic scripts, and the foundation of scientific and mathematical notation. Unicode encodes classical and modern Greek characters, along with the closely related Coptic script, in dedicated blocks that are worth understanding if you work with Greek text, mathematics, or scientific writing.
The Greek and Coptic Block (U+0370–U+03FF)
The primary Greek block contains the modern Greek alphabet in both uppercase and lowercase, with precomposed forms carrying tonos and dialytika accents. Key characters include:
- U+0391 Α GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA — the first letter, visually identical to Latin A but a different code point
- U+03A9 Ω GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA — often used as the ohm symbol in physics
- U+03C0 π GREEK SMALL LETTER PI — pi, the mathematical constant
- U+03BC μ GREEK SMALL LETTER MU — used for "micro" prefix in scientific units
- U+03B5 ε GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON — used in calculus for arbitrarily small quantities
Ancient Greek: Extended and Polytonic
Modern Greek uses only a single accent (tonos), but ancient and classical Greek uses a polytonic system with three accents (acute, grave, circumflex), two breathings (smooth and rough), and a subscript iota. These precomposed polytonic forms are in the Greek Extended block (U+1F00–U+1FFF)—one of the larger blocks in Unicode, reflecting the complexity of classical Greek orthography.
Coptic
Coptic—the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in an alphabet derived from Greek—was historically encoded in the Greek block, sharing some code points. Unicode 4.1 gave Coptic its own block (U+2C80–U+2CFF), separating the two scripts cleanly and enabling better font and rendering support for Coptic manuscripts. Browse scripts and their blocks in the scripts catalogue.
Greek in Mathematics
Greek letters are ubiquitous in scientific and mathematical notation. When you need α, β, γ, δ, θ, λ, σ, φ, ψ, or ω in a web page, use the Unicode characters directly rather than images or MathML when the context is simple enough. For complex mathematical expressions, MathML or LaTeX-rendered mathematics (via MathJax or KaTeX) is the right choice. See the mathematical characters article for the broader Unicode math landscape.