Number & MeasureGreek → English
Omega
/oʊˈmeɪɡə/noun
The last letter of the Greek alphabet, and by extension the end of anything.
The Greek roots
ὦ μέγα
ô méga
great o
Literally: “big O”
Follow a root:ὦ μέγα1 word
The story of the word
The name means 'great O', the long o, coined in Byzantine times to keep the letter apart from ὂ μικρόν, little o. Because it closes the alphabet, Revelation puts it in God's mouth as the far end of everything, and English has used the phrase for beginning and end since the fourteenth century. Cantor gave ω to the first infinite ordinal; engineers gave Ω to the ohm and to angular frequency; each of them was reaching for the last one in the row.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
omicronmegaphonemegalopolisalphabet
In a sentence
He treats his own opinion as the alpha and omega of the discussion.
The resistance is written in ohms, so the symbol is a capital omega.