U+03B1 "α" Greek Small Letter Alpha Unicode Character

U+03B1 "α" Greek Small Letter Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and serves as a foundational symbol in mathematics, science, and engineering, often representing angles, coefficients, and the fine-structure constant, among other concepts. In the Greek language, it functions as a vowel with a short or long sound, and its name derives from the Phoenician letter "aleph." This character is distinct from the Latin letter "a" and is commonly used in fields such as physics, chemistry, and linguistics for notations like alpha particles, alpha decay, and alpha taxonomy.

General Properties

Code Point	U+03B1
Version Added	1.1
Name	Greek Small Letter Alpha
Block	Greek and Coptic
General Category	Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	α
HTML Hex Encoding	α
UTF-8 Encoding	0xCE 0xB1
UTF-16 Encoding	0x03B1
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000003B1
C/C++/Java Escape	\u03b1

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
Lowercase	Yes
Simple Uppercase Code Point	"Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha
Simple Titlecase Code Point	"Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha
Uppercase Code Point	"Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha
Titlecase Code Point	"Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha
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