digamma

Also known as Ϝ

Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma; as a numeral, it was called episēmon during the Byzantine era and is now known as stigma after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.

AI overview

Digamma is an ancient Greek letter that was originally used to represent a particular sound but eventually fell out of everyday use in the language. Today, it survives mainly as a Greek numeral representing the number 6, and has been called by various names throughout history, including "wau," "digamma," and "stigma."

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Wikidata facts

Image: Greek letter digamma on font lines.svg

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Commons category: Digamma (letter)
Unicode character: ϝ

Sources (1)

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Article

21 sections

Contents

Greek w
Mycenaean Greek
Classical Greek
Pamphylian digamma
Numeral
Glyph development
Epigraphy
Early handwriting
Conflation with the στ ligature
Typography
Glyph confusion
Names
Wau
Digamma
Episemon
Gabex or Gamex
Stigma
Unicode
References
Sources
External links

Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon (), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek inscriptions until the classical period.