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Origin Adapted from Phoenician consonantal script, about the 8th century BCE
Omega is the twenty-fourth and last letter of the Greek alphabet, a late Greek addition made by doubling the O to mark the long o; its name means the great O, o-mega, as against Omicron, the little o. It sounds the long open o, and its value in isopsephy is eight hundred, placing it eight hundredth in the numeral order. The numeral nine hundred that would follow belonged to the archaic letter sampi, kept only as a numeral and not among these twenty-four letters. As the final letter, Omega is the great symbol of the end and of completion: in the Book of Revelation, 'I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end', so that Alpha and Omega together name the eternal God. In physics the capital Omega is the unit of electrical resistance, the ohm, and denotes solid angle and a class of baryon, while the lowercase omega denotes angular velocity or frequency; in cosmology capital Omega is the density parameter of the universe.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAdapted from Phoenician consonantal script, about the 8th century BCE 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin PeriodEvery European alphabet descends from that decision 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin PeriodInnovation: wrote vowels with letters of their own 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Place of OriginPrecise place disputed: Al Mina, Cyprus, Crete, Euboea all argued for 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Place of OriginThe Aegean world, at a point of contact with Phoenician traders 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameA Greek creation: o mega, "the great O", against omicron, "the small O" 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameAdded last, closing the alphabet; hence Alpha and Omega as first and last 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameAlpha, beta, gamma are aleph, bet, gimel: ox, house, camel 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameClearest evidence the alphabet was taken over, not invented 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameGreek letter names are borrowed Semitic words meaning nothing in Greek 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Sense of the Namegreat O; a Greek creation doubled from omicron 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred. Sense of the Namethe great O, as against Omicron, the little o 1 Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, inherited from Phoenician's twenty-two consonantal signs but repurposing several of them, for the first time in the alphabet's history, to write vowels outright. 1 PositionTwenty-fourth and last of twenty-four in the Greek alphabet 1 Attributions
Associated Sound Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIsopsephy (Greek gematria) attested in inscriptions and magical papyri 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe 27-sign series used three lost letters: digamma/stigma, koppa, sampi 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Meaning in the Attesting SourceThis atlas's 24 letters hold none of those three 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Learn More
Omega: The Greek Letter (Value 800), from Great O
Omega is the twenty-fourth and last Greek letter, created by the Greeks by opening the loop of omicron to mark the long o; its name means 'great O' (o-mega) and its value is 800, the highest of the classical letter-numerals. As the last letter Omega means 'the end' or 'the last', and in the Book of Revelation it is paired with Alpha in the divine title 'the Alpha and the Omega', a genuine and well-known symbolic use.
The Greek letters doubled as numerals in the Milesian (alphabetic) system, in which each letter carried a fixed value; the practice of summing a word's letters into a number, called isopsephy, is the Greek counterpart of Hebrew gematria and appears in inscriptions, the Greek Magical Papyri and early Christian texts. Omega is one of four supplementary letters, together with Phi, Chi and Psi, added at the end of the Greek alphabet once its Phoenician-derived series had run out; its name, coined in Greek as o mega, the great O, was set deliberately against omicron, the small O, and because it was added last of all, closing the alphabet, the Book of Revelation's title the Alpha and the Omega pairs the first and last Greek letters as a figure for beginning and end. Its isopsephy value of 800 belongs to the Milesian alphabetic numeral system, which also needed three further, otherwise obsolete letters, digamma (also called stigma), koppa and sampi, to cover every value from 1 up to 900; none of the three survives among the 24 letters in ordinary use today.
Omega and the Ionic Reform
Omega, like eta, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, entered the Greek alphabet used today through the Ionic script reform Athens adopted by decree in 403 BCE, under the archon Eucleides; the older Athenian local alphabet had no separate sign for a long o sound and wrote it the same way as short o, using omicron, but the Ionic alphabet had already split the vowel into omicron for short o and a new letter, omega, meaning great o, for the long one. Omega's ancient meaning as the alphabet's last letter, and its Christian pairing with alpha discussed elsewhere in this atlas, is well known; its modern technical uses are more scattered.
Physicists use lowercase omega for angular velocity and for angular frequency in wave equations, and the SI unit of electrical resistance, the ohm, is written with an uppercase Omega, chosen in the 19th century in honour of the physicist Georg Ohm and, incidentally, for the letter's resemblance to a horseshoe-shaped resistor coil. Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, common in nutrition science, take their names instead from a chemical convention that counts carbon atoms from the far end of a molecule's chain, the end chemists label omega by analogy with the letter's position as the alphabet's last.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Derived from This
Taken over as a shape, a name and a value, and with the Alpha and Omega pairing
Omega is Greek omega, kept in Cyrillic as a second sign for o and carrying its numeral value of 800.
Otu is the second Glagolitic sign for a rounded back vowel and answers to Greek omega, whose place it takes in the order. Greek of the ninth century read omega and omicron alike, so the second sign records a Greek spelling rather than a second Slavonic sound. Where the Glagolitic letterform came from is a separate question and is recorded separately.
Related To
Coptic Omega is the Greek omega, the last letter Coptic took from Greek, and both carry the Book of Revelation sense of the beginning and the end alongside Alpha; both carry the numeral value 800.
Omega is a late Greek addition formed by doubling Omicron to mark the long O, against Omicron's short o; its own name, the great O against the little o, records the split directly.
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