Greek alphabet | |||
---|---|---|---|
Αα | Alpha | Νν | Nu |
Ββ | Beta | Ξξ | Xi |
Γγ | Gamma | Οο | Omicron |
Δδ | Delta | Ππ | Pi |
Εε | Epsilon | Ρρ | Rho |
Ζζ | Zeta | Σσς | Sigma |
Ηη | Eta | Ττ | Tau |
Θθ | Theta | Υυ | Upsilon |
Ιι | Iota | Φφ | Phi |
Κκ | Kappa | Χχ | Chi |
Λλ | Lambda | Ψψ | Psi |
Μμ | Mu | Ωω | Omega |
History | |||
Archaic local variants · · · · · |
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Ligatures (ϛ, ȣ, ϗ) · Diacritics | |||
Numerals: (6) · (90) · (900) | |||
In other languages | |||
Bactrian · Coptic · Albanian | |||
Scientific symbols | |||
Book · Category · Commons |
Mu (uppercase Μ, lowercase μ; Ancient Greek μῦ [mŷː]), Modern Greek μι or μυ [mi]) is the 12th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 40. Mu was derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol for water (𓈖) which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become 𐤌. Letters that arose from mu include the Roman M and the Cyrillic М.
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In Ancient Greek, the name of the letter is written μῦ and pronounced [mŷː].
In Modern Greek, the name of the letter is spelled μι and pronounced [mi]. In monotonic orthography, the ancient version is written with an acute accent instead of a circumflex: μύ.
The lower-case letter mu (μ) is used as a special symbol in many academic fields. The upper case mu is not used, since it is normally identical to Latin M.
In mathematics:
In measurement:
In classical physics and engineering:
In particle physics:
In thermodynamics:
In chemistry:
In pharmacology:
In application names:
The Olympus Corporation manufactures a series of digital cameras called Olympus µ[mju:] or Olympus Stylus.[2]
In phonology, it often stands for mora.
In Unicode, the upper and lower case mu are encoded at U+039C and U+03BC respectively. In ISO 8859-7 they are encoded at CCHEX and ECHEX. In HTML code, the μ character is represented by "μ", "μ" and the entity "μ".
The micro sign or micron is considered a distinct character from the Greek alphabet letter by Unicode for historical reasons (although it is a homoglyph) and is found at U+00B5 as well as position B5HEX in ISO 8859-1, 3, 8, 9, 13 and 15, and thus in the corresponding Windows code pages Windows-1252 etc. In HTML code, the µ symbol is represented by "µ", "µ" and the entity "µ". When Alt-0181 or the DOS legacy Alt+230 is typed into an editable field using the numeric keypad in Microsoft Windows, the µ symbol appears. Also pressing AltGr + M results in a µ on some keyboard layouts.
Because µ is the abbreviation for the metric system prefix micro-, the symbol is used in many word plays about the field of micro-computing. For example, the symbol is used in the name and logo of the popular bittorrent client, µTorrent. Also, the microcontrollers are commonly represented in schematics as µC. It is sometimes simply substituted with a u, the most similar-looking ASCII glyph, e.g. uTorrent.