U+03C5 "υ" Greek Small Letter Upsilon Unicode Character

Unicode Version 17.0

υ

U+03C5 "υ" Greek Small Letter Upsilon is the twenty-second letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter waw, and serves as the ancestor of the Latin letters U, V, W, and Y. In modern Greek, it represents the close front rounded vowel sound /i/ when used as a vowel, similar to the English "ee," and as a consonant it can indicate a voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in certain diphthongs. Historically, this character has played a significant role in linguistics and mathematics, where it often symbolizes physical quantities such as the coefficient of kinematic viscosity or the upsilon meson in particle physics. Its lowercase form is visually distinct from the uppercase Greek letter Y, which is identical in shape to the Latin Y.

General Properties

Code Point U+03C5
Version Added 1.1
Name Greek Small Letter Upsilon
Block Greek and Coptic
General Category Lowercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class Left To Right

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding υ
HTML Hex Encoding υ
UTF-8 Encoding 0xCF 0x85
UTF-16 Encoding 0x03C5
UTF-32 Encoding 0x000003C5
C/C++/Java Escape \u03c5

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 "Υ" U+03A5 Greek Capital Letter Upsilon
Simple Titlecase Code Point "Υ" U+03A5 Greek Capital Letter Upsilon
Uppercase Code Point "Υ" U+03A5 Greek Capital Letter Upsilon
Titlecase Code Point "Υ" U+03A5 Greek Capital Letter Upsilon
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