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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 І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and Je (Ј, ј), and iotated 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.
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 derives from iota. The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J (Jot / jota) is derived from iota.
<span class="anchor" id="Symbol"></span> Uses
- In some programming languages (e.g., A+, APL, C++, Go), iota (either as the lowercase symbol <code>⍳</code> or the identifier <code>iota</code>) is used to represent and generate an array of consecutive integers. For example, in APL <code>⍳4</code> gives <code>1 2 3 4</code>.
- The lowercase iota symbol is sometimes used to write the imaginary unit, but more often Roman i or j is used.
- In 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.
- Turned iota was formerly used for the Sinological phonetic notation letter now transcribed as .
Unicode
For accented Greek characters, see Greek diacritics: Computer encoding.
- ( in TeX)
See also
- Hurricane Iota