Iota (; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; ) is the ninth letter of the
Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter
Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the
Latin I and
J, the
Cyrillic
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = G ...
І (І, і),
Yi (Ї, ї), and
Je (Ј, ј), and
iotated
In Slavic languages, iotation (, ) is a form of palatalization that occurs when a consonant comes into contact with a palatal approximant from the succeeding phoneme. The is represented by iota (ι) in the Cyrillic alphabet and the Greek alphab ...
letters (e.g.
Yu (Ю, ю)). In the system of
Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10.
Iota represents the
close front unrounded vowel . In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long and short versions, but this distinction was lost in
Koine Greek.
Iota participated as the second element in
falling diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
s, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written in
polytonic orthography as
iota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became
digraphs for simple vowels in
Koine Greek.
[see Koine Greek phonology]
The word is used in a common English phrase, "not one iota", meaning "not the slightest amount". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possibly
yodh, י, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet. The English word ''
jot
Jot or JOT may refer to:
Persons with the name
* Jot Agyeman (born 1967), Ghanaian actor
* Jot D. Carpenter (1938–2000), American landscape architect
* Jot Goar (1870–1947), American baseball player
Computing
* Jot (programming language)
* ...
'' derives from iota. The German, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J (''
Jot
Jot or JOT may refer to:
Persons with the name
* Jot Agyeman (born 1967), Ghanaian actor
* Jot D. Carpenter (1938–2000), American landscape architect
* Jot Goar (1870–1947), American baseball player
Computing
* Jot (programming language)
* ...
'' / ''
jota
Jota may refer to:
__NOTOC__
* Iota (Ι, ι), the name of the 9th letter in the Greek alphabet;
* (figuratively) ''Something very small'', based on the fact that the letter Iota (lat. i) is the smallest character in the alphabet;
* The name of the ...
'') is derived from iota.
Symbol
* In some
programming languages (e.g.,
A+,
APL,
C++,
Go), iota (either as the lowercase symbol
⍳ or the identifier
iota) is used to represent and generate an array of consecutive integers. For example, in APL
⍳4 gives
1 2 3 4.
* The lowercase iota symbol is sometimes used to write the
imaginary unit, but more often Roman
i or
j is used.
* In
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
, the
inclusion map of one space into another is sometimes denoted by the lowercase iota.
* In
logic, the lowercase iota denotes the
definite descriptor.
* The lowercase iota symbol has Unicode code point U+03B9 and the uppercase U+0399.
Character encodings
Greek Iota / Ypogegrammeni
Coptic Iaude
Latin Iota
Cyrillic Iota
Technical Iota
Mathematical Iota
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.
References
{{Reflist
Greek letters
Vowel letters