Uses and Meaning of the Sigma Symbol Throughout History Rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and you get the capital version of the sigma symbol. The Phoenician shin looks exactly like the capital letter ‘W’ in the modern English alphabet. It is believed that the ancient civilizations in what constitutes modern day Lebanon, Syria and northern Israel heavily relied on this system of alphabets for communication. In case you are unaware, Phoenician is the oldest known system of alphabets that dates as far back as 1050 BC. Shin is the twenty-first character in the Phoenician alphabet, sometimes also referred to as the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. Some semioticians suggest that the sigma symbol is derived from ‘shin.’ In the Greek numerals, also known as Alexandrian numerals (a system of using Greek letters to write different numbers), sigma corresponds to a value of 200. Moreover, the enunciation of both the alphabets also has quite a similar ring to one another. Σ looks a lot like ‘S’ written in a rough typeface with sharp lines and an additional horizontal stroke at the bottom.
This doesn’t seem so surprising especially when you take into account the shape of the letter ‘s’ and the uppercase sigma symbol. This brings us to another interesting fact about the sigma sign, which is that it is usually viewed as the equivalent of the letter ‘s’ in modern English. It is a special letter used to denote the last alphabet in a Greek word, provided that the particular word in consideration does not consist only of capital alphabets.įor example, consider the word Ὀδυσσεύς which is the Greek representation of the word ‘Odysseus.’ You will notice that the last ‘s’ in Odysseus is denoted by the letter-final sigma (ς) whereas the other two ‘s’ in the middle of Odysseus are represented by the lowercase sigma (σ) sign in the Greek variation.
It can be thought of as another type of lowercase sigma symbol that is only used at the end of a word. This relatively unknown sigma sign is called ‘letter-final sigma.’ However, while it is common to see uppercase and lowercase sigma signs in science textbooks and the likes, what many people are completely unaware of is the fact that the sigma sign has a third form as well. The sigma sign has been used in mathematics, chemistry, and other fields of study for a very long time. Sigma Symbol, The Eighteenth Letter in Greek Alphabet – ©Niakris6 at ShutterStock Uses and Meaning of the Sigma Symbol Throughout Historyīeing the eighteenth letter in the Greek alphabet, Sigma comes right after the letter Rho and is followed by Tau.Īs is the case with most of the other alphabets, even English for that matter, two different symbols are used to represent sigma in uppercase and lowercase respectively.
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