U+03AC "ά" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Tonos Unicode Character

U+03AC "ά" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Tonos is the accented form of the Greek letter alpha, used in modern Greek writing to indicate the stressed vowel sound in a word, particularly the high or rising tone that marks lexical stress. It belongs to the Greek and Coptic block, encoded in Unicode 1.1, and is commonly employed in polytonic and monotonic orthography to distinguish meaning or pronunciation in words like "γάτα" (gáta, meaning cat). This character combines the base letter alpha with a combining tonos accent, essential for correct spelling and reading in standard Greek.

General Properties

Code Point	U+03AC
Version Added	1.1
Name	Greek Small Letter Alpha with Tonos
Unicode 1.0 Name	Greek Small Letter Alpha Tonos
Block	Greek and Coptic
General Category	Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right
Decomposition Type	Canonical
Decomposition Mapping	"α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha "́" U+0301 Combining Acute Accent

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	ά
HTML Hex Encoding	ά
UTF-8 Encoding	0xCE 0xAC
UTF-16 Encoding	0x03AC
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000003AC
C/C++/Java Escape	\u03ac

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Lowercase	Yes
Simple Uppercase Code Point	"Ά" U+0386 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos
Simple Titlecase Code Point	"Ά" U+0386 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos
Uppercase Code Point	"Ά" U+0386 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos
Titlecase Code Point	"Ά" U+0386 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos
Cased	Yes
Changes When Casemapped	Yes
Changes When Titlecased	Yes
Changes When Uppercased	Yes
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	Lower