U+1FC8 "Ὲ" Greek Capital Letter Epsilon with Varia Unicode Character

U+1FC8 "Ὲ" Greek Capital Letter Epsilon with Varia is used in classical and polytonic Greek orthography to represent the uppercase form of the letter epsilon (Ε) when it carries the "varia" or grave accent. This diacritical mark, which appears as a small downward sloping line above the letter, indicates a specific pitch accent in ancient Greek pronunciation, typically a lower or falling tone on the vowel. In modern Greek, the grave accent has been largely replaced by the acute accent for monotonic writing, so this character is primarily encountered in historical texts, scholarly editions, and educational settings where traditional accentuation is preserved.

General Properties

Code Point	U+1FC8
Version Added	1.1
Name	Greek Capital Letter Epsilon with Varia
Block	Greek Extended
General Category	Uppercase Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Left To Right
Decomposition Type	Canonical
Decomposition Mapping	"Ε" U+0395 Greek Capital Letter Epsilon "̀" U+0300 Combining Grave Accent

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	Ὲ
HTML Hex Encoding	Ὲ
UTF-8 Encoding	0xE1 0xBF 0x88
UTF-16 Encoding	0x1FC8
UTF-32 Encoding	0x00001FC8
C/C++/Java Escape	\u1fc8

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	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
Lowercase Code Point	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
Simple Case Folding	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
Case Folding	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
Cased	Yes
Changes When Casefolded	Yes
Changes When Casemapped	Yes
Changes When Lowercased	Yes
Changes When NFKC Casefolded	Yes
NFKC Casefold	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
NFKC Simple Casefold	"ὲ" U+1F72 Greek Small Letter Epsilon with Varia
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