Greek Small Letter Lamda
Part of Greek Letters
Greek Small Letter Lamda has no standard Windows Alt code. Copy the character directly, or use its HTML entity or Unicode value instead.
- Alt code
- None
- HTML entity
- λ
- Unicode
- U+03BB
About this symbol
Lambda is best known today from computer science. In the 1930s the American logician Alonzo Church built the lambda calculus, a mathematical model of computation that underlies many programming languages.
Church gave different answers about why he chose λ. In a 1964 letter he said it came from a hat-like mark used by Whitehead and Russell, which became ∧ and then λ for ease of printing; later he called it an accident, and once replied to the question with a postcard reading “eeny, meeny, miny, moe”.
Unicode facts
- Official name
- GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA
- Also called
- Lambda
- Type
- Lowercase letter
- Unicode block
- Greek and Coptic
- Unicode group
- Letters
- Added in
- Unicode 1.1 (1993)
- Related
- Latin Small Letter Lambda U+A7DB
Click the symbol or any value at the top of the page to copy it. See the full Greek Letters chart for related characters.