U+1FB1 "ᾱ" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Macron Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
ᾱ
U+1FB1 "ᾱ" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Macron is a precomposed character used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to represent a long alpha vowel, distinguished by the macron diacritic placed above the letter. This character is part of the Greek Extended block and serves as a typographic alternative to combining a standard alpha (α) with the combining macron (U+0304), ensuring correct rendering and vowel length indication in scholarly texts, particularly for metrical and grammatical analysis. Its inclusion in Unicode facilitates precise representation of phonological distinctions in historical and linguistic contexts, supporting digital preservation of classical and academic Greek works.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+1FB1 |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Small Letter Alpha with Macron |
| Block | Greek Extended |
| General Category | Lowercase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "α" U+03B1 Greek Small Letter Alpha "̄" U+0304 Combining Macron |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ᾱ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ᾱ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0xBE 0xB1 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x1FB1 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00001FB1 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u1fb1 |
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 | "Ᾱ" U+1FB9 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Macron |
| Simple Titlecase Code Point | "Ᾱ" U+1FB9 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Macron |
| Uppercase Code Point | "Ᾱ" U+1FB9 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Macron |
| Titlecase Code Point | "Ᾱ" U+1FB9 Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Macron |
| 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 |