U+0391 "Α" Greek Capital Letter Alpha Unicode Character

U+0391 "Α" Greek Capital Letter Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, historically derived from the Phoenician letter aleph, and corresponds to the vowel sound /a/ in both Ancient and Modern Greek. In Unicode, it is assigned a hexadecimal code point of 0391 and belongs to the Greek and Coptic block, often used in mathematical and scientific notation to denote angles, coefficients, or the first item in a sequence. As a capital letter, it is visually distinct from its lowercase counterpart α (U+03B1) and shares its shape with the Latin letter A, although it is encoded separately to preserve typographic and linguistic identity.

General Properties

Code Point	U+0391
Version Added	1.1
Name	Greek Capital Letter Alpha
Block	Greek and Coptic
General Category	Uppercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	Α
HTML Hex Encoding	Α
UTF-8 Encoding	0xCE 0x91
UTF-16 Encoding	0x0391
UTF-32 Encoding	0x00000391
C/C++/Java Escape	\u0391

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
East Asian Width	Ambiguous
Uppercase	Yes
Simple Lowercase Code Point	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
Lowercase Code Point	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
Simple Case Folding	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
Case Folding	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
Cased	Yes
Changes When Casefolded	Yes
Changes When Casemapped	Yes
Changes When Lowercased	Yes
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
NFKC Simple Casefold	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha
Script	Greek
Script Extensions	Greek
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
ID Start	Yes
XID Start	Yes
ID Continue	Yes
XID Continue	Yes
Alphabetic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break	Upper