What does digamma mean?
Digamma is the name given to an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet, written Ϝ (lowercase ϝ), whose shape resembles two gammas stacked together and whose sound was /w/, corresponding to Latin F. It stood in the alphabet where modern Greeks place the letters stau-like sequences had shifted, but by the classical period the sound had disappeared from most dialects, and with it the letter itself. Its memory survives chiefly in scholarship: restoring the digamma repairs apparent metrical faults in Homer, since words like oinos ('wine') originally began with a /w/. In Greek numerals, the sign descended from digamma came to represent six. Today the word is a specialist term of philology and historical linguistics, valuable to anyone interested in how languages shed sounds and scripts shed letters over time.
nounAn archaic letter of the Greek alphabet (Ϝ lowercase ϝ), shaped like a double gamma and representing the /w/ sound in early Greek; it was later dropped from the classical alphabet and its numerical value of 6 was transferred to stigma.
- The obsolete sixth-position letter of the early Greek alphabet (Ϝ), representing /w/ and equivalent to Latin F.
- The numeral 6 in Greek alphabetic notation after the letter fell out of use.
"The earliest inscriptions at Athens still preserve the digamma, marking the /w/ sound that later Greek lost."
"Pausanias noted that the people of Elis still used the digamma in their local dialect long after other Greeks had abandoned it."
"In alphabetic numerals, the sign derived from the old digamma was used to write six."
Standard English plural; the learned plural digammata is rare.
"Early inscriptions from several dialects contain digammas where classical spelling has none."
Homer's epics once sounded different from how we read them today — thousands of lines that seem metrically 'broken' are repaired by restoring a single vanished letter: the digamma.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of digamma
The word digamma comes from Greek, combining di- ('twice' or 'double') with gamma, because the letter Ϝ looks like two gammas superimposed. The letter itself descends from the Phoenician waw via the same route as Latin F, and represented the /w/ sound preserved in some early Greek dialects such as Boeotian and Doric. As /w/ faded from most Greek speech, the letter dropped out of the Ionic alphabet that became standard, though it lived on indirectly in Greek numeral notation for six. English borrowed the term in scholarly writing on Greek, likely in the early modern period as Renaissance humanists studied ancient inscriptions and manuscripts.
Related word forms
How digamma is actually used
A technical term encountered almost exclusively in classical philology, historical linguistics, epigraphy, and discussions of Homeric metre. It is not used in everyday English.
Easily confused with digamma
Sigma is an extant Greek letter for the /s/ sound, while digamma is a long-obsolete letter for the lost /w/ sound.