U+03AC "ά" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Tonos Unicode Character

U+03AC "ά" Greek Small Letter Alpha with Tonos is the accented form of the Greek letter alpha, used in modern Greek writing to indicate the stressed vowel sound in a word, particularly the high or rising tone that marks lexical stress. It belongs to the Greek and Coptic block, encoded in Unicode 1.1, and is commonly employed in polytonic and monotonic orthography to distinguish meaning or pronunciation in words like "γάτα" (gáta, meaning cat). This character combines the base letter alpha with a combining tonos accent, essential for correct spelling and reading in standard Greek.