Greek Small Letter Alpha
Part of Greek Letters
On Windows, hold Alt and type 224 on the numeric keypad to insert greek small letter alpha.
- Alt code
- Alt+224
- HTML entity
- α
- Unicode
- U+03B1
About this symbol
Alpha comes from aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, whose name meant ox. Alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters, gave us the word “alphabet”.
In 1899 Ernest Rutherford named the two kinds of radiation he had found alpha and beta. Ten years later, in 1909, he and Thomas Royds showed that alpha particles are helium nuclei.
Unicode facts
- Official name
- GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
- Type
- Lowercase letter
- Unicode block
- Greek and Coptic
- Unicode group
- Letters
- Added in
- Unicode 1.1 (1993)
Click the symbol or any value at the top of the page to copy it. See the full Greek Letters chart for related characters.