Unicode & HTML Codes for Greek Letters

Greek letters occupy two contiguous blocks in Unicode: the Greek and Coptic block (U+0370–U+03FF), which holds the modern 24-letter alphabet plus historical letters and symbols, and the Greek Extended block (U+1F00–U+1FFF), which contains the polytonic accent and breathing-mark combinations used for Ancient Greek. The 24 standard letters appear at predictable offsets: uppercase from U+0391 to U+03A9, lowercase from U+03B1 to U+03C9.

Each letter can be inserted in HTML in three equivalent ways, all of which render identically in every modern browser:

• Named entity (most readable): α → α
• Decimal numeric reference: α → α
• Hexadecimal numeric reference: α → α

Named entities are easiest to read in source code; numeric references are safer if you can't be sure the receiving environment supports HTML5 entity names. Either way, the underlying Unicode code point is the same — entities are just notation, not a separate character set.

Full Reference Table

The table below shows the Unicode code points (one for uppercase, one for lowercase) and all three HTML representations side by side. Sigma has an extra row for its final form (ς), which is used at the end of Greek words.

Common Mathematical and Historical Variants

Beyond the 24 standard letters, several closely related glyphs have their own code points. Some are mathematical alternates that look different from the prose form; others are historical letters once used in Greek numerals.

Practical Notes

• UTF-8 encoding: A Greek letter takes 2 bytes in UTF-8 (the dominant encoding on the web). Make sure your file is saved as UTF-8 and declares <meta charset="utf-8"> in the head — otherwise the characters may render as mojibake.
• Capitalization in named entities: Α gives Α and α gives α. Case matters.
• Avoid omicron (Ο/ο): Visually identical to Latin O/o. Search engines and accessibility tools treat them as different characters, so prefer the Latin letter unless you specifically need the Greek code point (e.g., for genuine Greek text).
• For LaTeX, use \alpha, \Gamma, etc. in math mode — see our LaTeX guide.