U+1F08 "Ἀ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Psili Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
Ἀ
U+1F08 "Ἀ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Psili is a polytonic Greek letter used in ancient and liturgical Greek texts, representing a capital alpha (Α) combined with a psili, or smooth breathing mark, which indicates that the vowel is pronounced without an aspirated "h" sound at the beginning of a word. Historically, this character appears in words like "Ἀθήνησι" (in Athens) where the initial alpha is unaspirated, distinguishing it from words with a rough breathing mark. In Unicode, it belongs to the Greek Extended block and is encoded as a single character for compatibility with classical scholarship, preserving the nuanced diacritical system of Ancient Greek orthography.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+1F08 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Psili |
| Block | Greek Extended |
| General Category | Uppercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha "̓" U+0313 Combining Comma Above |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | Ἀ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | Ἀ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0xBC 0x88 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x1F08 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00001F08 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u1f08 |
Unicode Properties
| NFC Quick Check | Yes |
| NFKC Quick Check | Yes |
| Numeric Type | None |
| Numeric Value | NaN |
| Line Break | Alphabetic |
| Uppercase | Yes |
| Simple Lowercase Code Point | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| Lowercase Code Point | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| Simple Case Folding | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| Case Folding | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| Cased | Yes |
| Changes When Casefolded | Yes |
| Changes When Casemapped | Yes |
| Changes When Lowercased | Yes |
| Changes When NFKC Casefolded | Yes |
| NFKC Casefold | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| NFKC Simple Casefold | "ἀ" U+1F00 Greek Small Letter Alpha with Psili |
| 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 | Upper |