U+1FBC "ᾼ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Prosgegrammeni Unicode Character
U+1FBC "ᾼ" Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Prosgegrammeni is a historic and typographic variant of the Greek capital letter alpha, combined with a small iota subscript or adscript, known as the prosgegrammeni, which indicates a long alpha followed by a silent iota in ancient Greek orthography. This character is used in polytonic Greek writing to represent certain grammatical forms such as feminine nouns or specific verb endings, particularly where the iota originally denoted a diphthong that later became a long vowel in pronunciation. In modern digital contexts, it is primarily employed in scholarly, liturgical, or historical texts, though it is rarely seen in contemporary standard Greek since monotonic spelling was adopted. The letter is encoded in the Unicode standard as part of the Greek Extended block to support accurate representation of ancient and medieval Greek manuscripts and editions.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+1FBC |
| Version Added | 1.1 |
| Name | Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Prosgegrammeni |
| Block | Greek Extended |
| General Category | Titlecase Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
| Decomposition Type | Canonical |
| Decomposition Mapping | "Α" U+0391 Greek Capital Letter Alpha "ͅ" U+0345 Combining Greek Ypogegrammeni |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | ᾼ |
| HTML Hex Encoding | ᾼ |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xE1 0xBE 0xBC |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0x1FBC |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00001FBC |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \u1fbc |