Stigma (letter)

Stigma (uppercase , lowercase ) is a ligature

Ligature (typography)

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on...

 of the Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to...

 letters sigma and tau, sometimes used in modern times to represent the Greek numeral 6. However, today the letters στ (ΣΤ, if capitalised) are more widely used to represent the number 6 or the ordinal 6th.


It is encoded in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 as "Greek letter stigma" U+03DA and "Greek small letter stigma" U+03DB .

Stigma (uppercase , lowercase ) is a ligature

Ligature (typography)

In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on...

 of the Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to...

 letters sigma and tau, sometimes used in modern times to represent the Greek numeral 6. However, today the letters στ (ΣΤ, if capitalised) are more widely used to represent the number 6 or the ordinal 6th.

History and use

It is encoded in Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 as "Greek letter stigma" U+03DA and "Greek small letter stigma" U+03DB . In modern typefaces, lowercase stigma is similar in appearance to final sigma

Sigma

Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the /s/ sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used. Sigma (upper case Σ, lower case σ; Greek Σιγμα, lower case in...

 (ς), but the top loop tends to be larger, and extends farther to the right. In historical handwriting, various other shapes existed.

'Stigma' is also a name for the cursive graphic form of the letter digamma

Digamma

Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet, used primarily as a Greek numeral.The letter had the phonetic value of a voiced labial-velar approximant . It was originally called wau. It was later called the "elusive" ' because of its shape...

 when used as the Greek numeral 6. This name is a modern misunderstanding. The ligature of στ did not occur in ancient times and only dates to later medieval manuscripts. In Sophocles' Lexicon of Byzantine Greek, which covers late antique Greek up to AD 1000, there is no mention of "stigma" as either a ligature or a number.