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Concept
Epsilon
Summary
Epsilon (ˈɛpsᵻlɒn, UKalsoɛpˈsaɪlən; uppercase Ε, lowercase ε or lunate ε; έψιλον) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel e̞ or ɛ̝. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He . Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.
The name of the letter was originally εἶ (êː), but it was later changed to ἒ ψιλόν (e psilon 'simple e') in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter from the digraph αι, a former diphthong that had come to be pronounced the same as epsilon.
The uppercase form of epsilon is identical to Latin E but has its own code point in Unicode: . The lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting. One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed number "3" and is encoded . The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar: it is encoded . While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols: computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them. In TeX, \epsilon ( ) denotes the lunate form, while \varepsilon ( ) denotes the reversed-3 form. Unicode versions 2.0.0 and onwards use as the lowercase Greek epsilon letter, but in version 1.0.0, was used.
There is also a 'Latin epsilon', or "open e", which looks similar to the Greek lowercase epsilon. It is encoded in Unicode as and and is used as an IPA phonetic symbol. The lunate or uncial epsilon provided inspiration for the euro sign, .
The lunate epsilon, , is not to be confused with the set membership symbol ; nor should the Latin uppercase epsilon, , be confused with the Greek uppercase (sigma).
Official source
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