Words & WritingGreek → English
Alpha
/ˈælfə/noun
The first letter of the Greek alphabet, and by extension the first or dominant member of any series.
The Greek roots
ἄλφα
álpha
first Greek letter
Literally: “ox, from Phoenician ʾālep”
Follow a root:ἄλφα2 words
The story of the word
The Greeks did not invent the letter name. They borrowed ʾālep from Phoenician, where it meant ox, and padded it with a vowel so it would sound Greek. Because alpha comes first, it came to mean first of anything: Rutherford's alpha particle in 1899, the alpha wolf of 1930s captive-pack studies, alpha software before beta. Turn a capital A upside down and the crossbar still reads as a head with horns.
- How it travelled
- Phoenician → Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- late 14th century
Same family
alphabetalphanumericanalphabetic
In a sentence
The paper reports an alpha of 0.91, which is respectable for a twelve-item scale.
He called himself the alpha of the group, which settled the question of whether he was.