Language Matters | Omicron: where does the variant Covid-19 name come from? The Greek letter’s relationship to ‘eye’, its merging with ‘omega’, and why it’s not STEM-friendly

Alpha, beta, gamma, delta … Ever since the World Health Organization determined in May 2021 that its nomenclature for important strains in the Sars-CoV-2 variant classification would adopt Greek-letter names (as opposed to place-of-origin names, such as “Wuhan virus” or “South African variant”, the practice criticised for contributing to xenophobia and racism), we have all become a little more fluent in the Greek alphabet.

An ancestor of this alphabet you are reading now and of all modern European alphabets, developed in Greece around 1000BC, the Greek writing system was based on the closely related Phoenician script used for the West Semitic languages.

Phoenician script is an abjad – this word derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet – a writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant, and the appropriate vowel is simply inferred by the reader.

In adopting Phoenician script for Greek, amendments were made, including the reassigning of five Phoenician letters to denote vowel sounds A alpha, E epsilon, I iota, O omicron and Y upsilon – it becoming the earliest known writing script with symbols representing vowels as well as consonants.

The word “alphabet” entered English via the Middle French alphabete/French alphabet, and post-classical Latin alphabetum, ultimately from the ancient Greek ἄλϕα alpha + βῆτα beta, the first two Greek letters taken as a name for the whole (just as “ABC” refers to the English alphabet). Omicron came from the Phoenician letter o ayin, whose name is derived from the Proto-Semitic *ʿayn – meaning “eye” – the letter’s shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, is suggested to be ultimately derived from the Egyptian ı͗r hieroglyph.