Omega: The Coptic Letter (Value 800), from Greek Omega

Omega is the twenty fifth letter of the Coptic alphabet and the last of those taken from Greek, carrying the numeral value eight hundred. Its Greek name means great o, coined by grammarians to keep it apart from the short omicron, and Coptic kept the name where it renamed several of its neighbours. The letter writes a long o and forms a pair with ou. That pair does more work in Coptic scholarship than its plainness suggests, because the dialects divide the space between the two letters differently and a word written with omega in Sahidic may appear with ou in Bohairic or in one of the smaller regional forms. Tables of those correspondences are among the first tools an editor reaches for when a manuscript has to be placed, and they are only possible because the Greek alphabet made Egyptian vowels visible for the first time in the language history of Egypt.

Omega also carries into Coptic the Christian sense that the Book of Revelation fixed on it, where God and Christ are named the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. The pairing of the first and last Greek letters as a title of eternity travelled everywhere Christianity was written, and Coptic funerary stelae, textiles and church fittings from Egypt carry the two letters flanking a cross exactly as Greek and Latin monuments do. In the numeral series omega closes the hundreds at eight hundred, with one further numeral sign after it for nine hundred that writes no sound.