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Origin Adapted from Phoenician consonantal script, about the 8th century BCE
Nu is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, from the Phoenician nun, meaning fish or serpent, and the ancestor of Latin N. It sounds the n, and its value in isopsephy is fifty, placing it fiftieth in the numeral order. In physics the lowercase nu is the standard symbol for frequency and for the neutrino; in mathematics it denotes a degree of freedom and, paired with mu, a pair of tensor indices.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAdapted from Phoenician consonantal script, about the 8th century BCE 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin PeriodEvery European alphabet descends from that decision 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin PeriodInnovation: wrote vowels with letters of their own 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Place of OriginPrecise place disputed: Al Mina, Cyprus, Crete, Euboea all argued for 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Place of OriginThe Aegean world, at a point of contact with Phoenician traders 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameAlpha, beta, gamma are aleph, bet, gimel: ox, house, camel 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameClearest evidence the alphabet was taken over, not invented 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Origin of the NameGreek letter names are borrowed Semitic words meaning nothing in Greek 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Sense of the Namefish (from Phoenician nun) 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals The pictographic sense is a modern reconstruction from the letter name rather than a meaning attested in the script's own period, and the atlas records that position elsewhere on this letter. The name itself is inherited; the picture behind it is inferred. Identity
Script TypeAn alphabet: each letter writes a single sound, consonant or vowel, inherited from Phoenician's twenty-two consonantal signs but repurposing several of them, for the first time in the alphabet's history, to write vowels outright. 1 PositionThirteenth of twenty-four in the Greek alphabet 1 Attributions
Associated Sound Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceIsopsephy (Greek gematria) attested in inscriptions and magical papyri 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Meaning in the Attesting SourceThe 27-sign series used three lost letters: digamma/stigma, koppa, sampi 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Meaning in the Attesting SourceThis atlas's 24 letters hold none of those three 1Tradition: The Greek alphabet and the Milesian numerals Learn More
Nu: The Greek Letter (Value 50), from Fish
Nu is the thirteenth Greek letter, from Phoenician nun ('fish'); its value is 50. Nu has no notable independent esoteric tradition; its interest is linguistic and, through isopsephy, numerical. The Greek letters doubled as numerals in the Milesian (alphabetic) system, in which each letter carried a fixed value; the practice of summing a word's letters into a number, called isopsephy, is the Greek counterpart of Hebrew gematria and appears in inscriptions, the Greek Magical Papyri and early Christian texts. Nu's Phoenician ancestry places it in a borrowing whose exact point of contact, somewhere among Al Mina, Cyprus, Crete and Euboea in the Aegean world, is still disputed, though the borrowing itself, conventionally dated to around the 8th century BCE, is agreed to be the ancestor of every European alphabet still in use, including the Latin one covered elsewhere in this atlas.
The Greeks' own contribution was to give vowels dedicated letters of their own, something the consonant-only Phoenician script never did. Its isopsephy value of 50 belongs to the Milesian alphabetic numeral system, which also needed three further, otherwise obsolete letters, digamma (also called stigma), koppa and sampi, to cover every value from 1 up to 900; none of the three survives among the 24 letters in ordinary use today.
Nu in Modern Use
Nu is used in physics chiefly as the symbol for frequency, particularly the frequency of light and other electromagnetic radiation, a convention that has made it one of the more common Greek letters in physics equations despite the letter's otherwise modest ancient profile, covered elsewhere in this atlas. Nu also has a distinctly 21st-century footnote: when the World Health Organization introduced its 2021 system of naming notable coronavirus variants after successive letters of the Greek alphabet, it deliberately skipped both nu and the following letter, xi, when the naming sequence reached them.
The WHO stated at the time that nu was skipped because it could too easily be confused with the English word new in spoken reports, while xi was skipped to avoid association with a common surname, and the next designated variant was instead named Omicron, discussed elsewhere in this atlas. That skip is now probably nu's most widely reported appearance in ordinary news coverage, entirely disconnected from either its ancient Semitic root nun, meaning fish, or its narrow technical use in physics. Astronomers, following the Bayer star-naming convention of 1603, also use Nu to mark a constellation's thirteenth-brightest star.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Derived from This
The Latin letter N descends from Greek Nu, reaching Latin through the Etruscan adaptation of a Western Greek alphabet. A straightforward continuation of shape, order and sound value.
Nash takes its shape from Greek nu, with the slanting crossbar of the uncial hand, and its numeral value of 50 from the same letter.
Why this is disputed. Glagolitic Nashi is read as Greek Nu's counterpart in an alphabet Cyril modeled on Greek order and numeral values, but which theory explains where its rounded letterform actually came from is a live paleographic dispute. The mainstream palaeographic school, developed since Isaac Taylor's nineteenth century study, derives Glagolitic's ornamental shapes from medieval Greek cursive minuscule redesigned for Slavonic use. A rival idiographic school reads Glagolitic as substantially an original invention, its shapes built from basic forms such as the cross, circle and triangle rather than borrowed from any existing script, so this specific correspondence to Nu is accepted by one camp and denied by the other.
Taken over as a shape and a value; Coptic renamed it ne
Related To
Roman N and Greek Nu continue the same Phoenician nun.
Coptic Ne is the Greek nu under a Coptic name, writing the n sound and doing exceptionally heavy grammatical work in Coptic; both carry the numeral value 50.
Samaritan Nun and Greek Nu both continue the same Phoenician sign, and both write n.
Greek Nu and Hebrew Nun are cognates. Both continue the same Phoenician sign, which is why both carry the numeral value 50 in their letter-number systems. A shared ancestor, not a borrowing in either direction. The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician abjad in the early first millennium BC, and the Hebrew square script descends from the same abjad through Aramaic.
Hebrew Nun and Greek Nu continue the same Phoenician nun; both carry the numeral value 50 in their letter-number systems.
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