U+03CA "ϊ" Greek Small Letter Iota with Dialytika Unicode Character
U+03CA "ϊ" Greek Small Letter Iota with Dialytika is a variant of the Greek letter iota that features two dots, or a diaeresis, placed above it. This diacritical mark, known as the dialytika, indicates that the iota should be pronounced separately from a preceding vowel, rather than forming a diphthong, which is particularly important for correct pronunciation and clarity in written Greek. The character is used in both modern and ancient Greek orthography, appearing in words where the iota follows another vowel and requires distinction, such as in the word "προϊόν" (product). It belongs to the Greek and Coptic block in Unicode and serves as a distinct codepoint separate from the plain iota (U+03B9), ensuring that text encoding preserves the specific grammatical and phonetic function of the diacritic.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+03CA |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Small Letter Iota with Dialytika |
| Unicode 1.0 Name | Greek Small Letter Iota Diaeresis |
| Block | Greek and Coptic |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "ι" U+03B9 Greek Small Letter Iota "̈" U+0308 Combining Diaeresis |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ϊ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ϊ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xCF 0x8A |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x03CA |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x000003CA |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u03ca |
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 | "Ϊ" U+03AA Greek Capital Letter Iota with Dialytika |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Ϊ" U+03AA Greek Capital Letter Iota with Dialytika |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Ϊ" U+03AA Greek Capital Letter Iota with Dialytika |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Ϊ" U+03AA Greek Capital Letter Iota with Dialytika |
| 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 |