Iota

Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It came from an older letter called Yodh used by the Phoenician people. From iota, we get several important letters in other alphabets, such as the Latin letters I and J, and some special letters in the Cyrillic alphabet.

In the Greek way of counting, iota stands for the number 10. The letter iota makes the sound people make when saying words like "see" or "machine". Long ago, ancient Greeks used iota in different ways, but over time these changed.

We still use the idea of iota in everyday English. When someone says "not one iota", they mean "not even the tiniest bit". This comes from the fact that iota is one of the smallest letters you can write. Many European languages also use a word that comes from iota to name the letter J.

Uses

In some programming languages like A+, APL, C++, and Go, the symbol iota helps create lists of numbers in order. For example, in APL, ⍳4 makes the list 1 2 3 4.

The small iota symbol can sometimes stand for the imaginary unit in math, though people more often use the letters i or j. In math, iota can show how one space fits inside another. It is also used in logic to point to a specific thing. A turned version of iota was once used in special writing for sounds from Chinese studies.

Unicode

For accented Greek characters, see Greek diacritics: Computer encoding.

Here are some special symbols related to the Greek letter Iota: