This article is about the Greek letter Ο. For genus of the same name, see Omicron (genus). Omicron or Omikron (uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, literally "small o" : Όμικρον, o mikron, micron meaning 'small' in contrast to omega) is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 70. It is rarely used in mathematics because it is indistinguishable from the Latin letter O and easily confused with the digit 0. This letter is equal to the Phoenician letter Ayin. In modern Greek, Omicron represents the sound IPA: [ɔː]. Letters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O.
In Unicode the capital letter is codepoint U+039F and the lowercase is U+03BF.
The upper-case letter of omicron (O) was originally used as a symbol for Big O notation, representing the asymptotic rate of growth of a function in mathematics.
|
