U+03BA "κ" Greek Small Letter Kappa Unicode Character

U+03BA "κ" Greek Small Letter Kappa is the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless velar plosive sound, similar to the English "k." In modern Greek, it is pronounced as a hard "k" sound, and in ancient Greek, it also served as the basis for the Latin letter K. Beyond its linguistic role, this character is widely used as a mathematical symbol in fields such as geometry, statistics, and physics, where it often denotes curvature, thermal conductivity, or the von Kármán constant. Its lowercase form is distinct from the Latin "k" by its curved, open shape, and it is encoded in the Unicode Standard as part of the Greek and Coptic block.

General Properties

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

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	κ
HTML Hex Encoding	κ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xCE 0xBA
UTF-16 Encoding	0x03BA
UTF-32 Encoding	0x000003BA
C/C++/Java Escape	\u03ba

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	"Κ" U+039A Greek Capital Letter Kappa
Simple Titlecase Code Point	"Κ" U+039A Greek Capital Letter Kappa
Uppercase Code Point	"Κ" U+039A Greek Capital Letter Kappa
Titlecase Code Point	"Κ" U+039A Greek Capital Letter Kappa
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