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Mu (letter)
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Mu (uppercase ?, lowercase µ; or ) 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 () which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem . Letters that arose from Mu include the Roman M and the Cyrillic letter ?.
word Mu, pronounced or in English, is written in traditional Greek polytonic orthography.
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Encyclopedia
Mu (uppercase ?, lowercase µ; or ) 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 () which had been simplified by the Phoenicians and named after their word for water, to become Mem . Letters that arose from Mu include the Roman M and the Cyrillic letter ?.
Usage
Ancient Greek
The word Mu, pronounced or in English, is written in traditional Greek polytonic orthography. In Modern Greek the ancient version is sometimes written .
Modern Greek
In Modern Greek, the name of the letter is spelled and is pronounced [mi].
About
The letter Mu appears in conjunction with alpha and omega to signify the "beginning, middle (meson) and end", a phrase found in an Orphic verse describing Zeus, and later adopted to describe both JHWH and Jesus.
In Aeschylus' Eumenides, the repeated moaning of the letter Mu is the sound made by the sleeping Furies as the ghost of Clytemnestra begins to invoke them. It again appears as an ominous mantra in a 10th century Coptic papyrus, containing a Christian injunction against perjurers that invokes the angel Temeluchos:
- I adjure you by the seven perfect letters, ???????. You must appear to him, you must appear to him. I adjure you by the seven angels around the throne of the father.
Academia
The lower-case letter mu is used as a special symbol in many academic fields. The upper case Mu is not generally used in this way because it is normally indistinguishable from the Latin M.
Computing
In Unicode, the upper and lower case mu are encoded at 039C and U+03BC respectively. In ISO 8859-7 they are encoded at CCHEX and ECHEX. 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. ISO-8859-5 also has a character that looks somewhat like lower case mu at E6HEX but this is actually supposed to be the Cyrillic small letter tse.
When Alt-0181 or the DOS legacy Alt+230 or Alt+ is typed into an editable field using the numeric keypad in Microsoft Windows, the µ symbol appears. Also if AltGr + M is pressed you get µ.
In HTML code, the µ symbol is represented by "µ" (or "µ") and "µ".
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. It is sometimes simply substituted with a u, the most likely looking ASCII glyph, eg. uTorrent.
Popular culture
- Mike Paradinas, a British electronic musician, uses the letter in his stage name µ-ziq (pronounced music), as well as in the name of his record label Planet µ, often written Planet Mu.
- Typing the numbers (4,8,15,16,23,42) from the TV series Lost resulted in the character "µ". In Microsoft Windows, holding down the "Alt" key while entering these numbers results in the character appearing wherever your cursor is (though the 4 and 8 are superfluous).
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