Ϝ

Digamma (Ϝ, ϝ) is an obsolete letter of the Greek alphabet and has a numerical value of 6 (ϝʹ).

History

Derived from the Phoenician alphabet letter wau, which originally meant "hook". The sign of the Greek digamma gave rise to the Latin F.

Epigraphic variants

In archaic epigraphic sources the following variants appear:

In its numerical form:

Use

[...]i wanakti (“for the king”). Corinthian inscription that contains the word.άναural (wanax, “rey”) that begins with digomma.
Note also the iota in the form of σ, common in preclassic epigraphs.

When used as a numeral, digamma is written using the mark stigma (ς). When used as a letter, it has the shape of an F, which looks like the overlap of two uppercase gamma letters (Γ) (hence the name digamma= double gamma) and has the phonetic value / w/.

Greek pamphylia

Digamma panfilia

There is a graphical variant Say, in Greek pamphlet: .

Pamphylian Greek is an isolated and poorly documented dialect of Ancient Greek (600 to 330 BC) spoken on the southern coast of Asia Minor.

This variant is encoded in Unicode as "Capital Pamphylia Greek letter digamma" U+0376 (Ͷ) and "Pamphylia lowercase Greek letter digamma" U+0377 (ͷ).

Not to be confused with the almost identically shaped Cyrillic letter (used among others by Russian): И and which has the phonetic value /i/ or /ɪ/.

Unicode

• Greek

• Copt