Home U+0370 to U+03FF Greek and Coptic
Glyph for U+03F6
Source: Noto Sans

U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol

U+03F6 was added to Unicode in version 3.2 (2002). It belongs to the block U+0370 to U+03FF Greek and Coptic in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Math Symbol and is mainly used in the Greek script. The character is also known as reversed straight epsilon.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Other Neutral and is not mirrored. In text U+03F6 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Epsilon (, UK also ; uppercase Ε, lowercase ε or lunate ϵ; Greek: έψιλον) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel IPA: [e̞] or IPA: [ɛ̝]. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He . Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.

The name of the letter was originally εἶ (Ancient Greek: [êː]), but it was later changed to ἒ ψιλόν (e psilon 'simple e') in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter from the digraph αι, a former diphthong that had come to be pronounced the same as epsilon.

The uppercase form of epsilon looks identical to Latin E but has its own code point in Unicode: U+0395 Ε GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON. The lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting. One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed number "3" and is encoded U+03B5 ε GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON. The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar: it is encoded U+03F5 ϵ GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL. While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols: computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them. In TeX, epsilon ( ϵ {displaystyle epsilon !} ) denotes the lunate form, while varepsilon ( ε {displaystyle varepsilon !} ) denotes the reversed-3 form.

There is also a 'Latin epsilon', ɛ or "open e", which looks similar to the Greek lowercase epsilon. It is encoded in Unicode as U+025B ɛ LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E and U+0190 Ɛ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OPEN E and is used as an IPA phonetic symbol. The lunate or uncial epsilon provided inspiration for the euro sign, €.

The lunate epsilon, ϵ, is not to be confused with the set membership symbol ∈; nor should the Latin uppercase epsilon, Ɛ, be confused with the Greek uppercase Σ (sigma). The symbol ∈ {displaystyle in } , first used in set theory and logic by Giuseppe Peano and now used in mathematics in general for set membership ("belongs to") evolved from the letter epsilon, since the symbol was originally used as an abbreviation for the Latin word est. In addition, mathematicians often read the symbol ∈ as "element of", as in "1 is an element of the natural numbers" for 1 ∈ N {displaystyle 1in mathbb {N} } , for example. As late as 1960, ε itself was used for set membership, while its negation "does not belong to" (now ∉) was denoted by ε' (epsilon prime). Only gradually did a fully separate, stylized symbol take the place of epsilon in this role. In a related context, Peano also introduced the use of a backwards epsilon, ϶, for the phrase "such that", although the abbreviation s.t. is occasionally used in place of ϶ in informal cardinals.

Representations

System Representation
1014
UTF-8 CF B6
UTF-16 03 F6
UTF-32 00 00 03 F6
URL-Quoted %CF%B6
HTML-Escape ϶
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake ϶
HTML-Escape ϶
HTML-Escape ϶
alias reversed straight epsilon
LATEX \backepsilon

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age 3.2 (2002)
Unicode Name GREEK REVERSED LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL
Unicode 1 Name
Block Greek and Coptic
General Category Math Symbol
Script Greek
Bidirectional Category Other Neutral
Combining Class Not Reordered
Decomposition Type None
Decomposition Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Lowercase
Simple Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Uppercase
Simple Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Simple Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Case Folding Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
ASCII Hex Digit
Alphabetic
Bidi Control
Bidi Mirrored
Composition Exclusion
Case Ignorable
Changes When Casefolded
Changes When Casemapped
Changes When NFKC Casefolded
Changes When Lowercased
Changes When Titlecased
Changes When Uppercased
Cased
Full Composition Exclusion
Default Ignorable Code Point
Dash
Deprecated
Diacritic
Emoji Modifier Base
Emoji Component
Emoji Modifier
Emoji Presentation
Emoji
Extender
Extended Pictographic
FC NFKC Closure Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Grapheme Cluster Break Any
Grapheme Base
Grapheme Extend
Grapheme Link
Hex Digit
Hyphen
ID Continue
ID Start
IDS Binary Operator
IDS Trinary Operator and
Ideographic
Indic Mantra Category
Indic Positional Category NA
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Jamo Short Name
Join Control
Logical Order Exception
Math
Noncharacter Code Point
NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Casefold Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Other Alphabetic
Other Default Ignorable Code Point
Other Grapheme Extend
Other ID Continue
Other ID Start
Other Lowercase
Other Math
Other Uppercase
Prepended Concatenation Mark
Pattern Syntax
Pattern White Space
Quotation Mark
Regional Indicator
Radical
Sentence Break Other
Soft Dotted
Sentence Terminal
Terminal Punctuation
Unified Ideograph
Variation Selector
Word Break Other
White Space
XID Continue
XID Start
Expands On NFC
Expands On NFD
Expands On NFKC
Expands On NFKD
Bidi Paired Bracket Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Bidi Paired Bracket Type None
East Asian Width Neutral
Hangul Syllable Type Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment
Joining Group No_Joining_Group
Joining Type Non Joining
Line Break Alphabetic
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value not a number
Simple Case Folding Glyph for U+03F6 Greek Reversed Lunate Epsilon Symbol
Script Extension
Vertical Orientation R