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Zeta (UK: / ˈ z iː t ə /, US: / ˈ z eɪ t ə /; [1] uppercase Ζ, lowercase ζ; Ancient Greek: ζῆτα, Demotic Greek: ζήτα, classical [d͡zɛ̌ːta] or zē̂ta; Modern Greek: zíta) is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 7.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [5]
This is a list of letters of the Greek alphabet. The definition of a Greek letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode standard that a has script property of "Greek" and the general category of "Letter". An overview of the distribution of Greek letters is given in Greek script in Unicode.
Many of the letters familiar from the classical Greek alphabet displayed additional variation in shapes, with some of the variant forms being characteristic of specific local alphabets. The form of Ζ generally had a straight stem in all local alphabets in the archaic period. Θ was mostly crossed (or ).
Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/ and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon ( /u/ ), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet.
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However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked [h]) came to stand for the long vowel [ɛː], and a new letter, omega, was developed for long [ɔː]. The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to derive from omicron with a line drawn under it.