Phi

Phi (/faɪ/;^[1] uppercase Φ, lowercase φ or ϕ; Ancient Greek: ϕεῖ pheî [pʰéî̯]; Modern Greek: φι fi [fi]) is the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet.

In Archaic and Classical Greek (c. 9th to 4th century BC), it represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive ([pʰ]), which was the origin of its usual romanization as ⟨ph⟩. During the later part of Classical Antiquity, in Koine Greek (c. 4th century BC to 4th century AD), its pronunciation shifted to a voiceless bilabial fricative ([ɸ]), and by the Byzantine Greek period (c. 4th century AD to 15th century AD) it developed its modern pronunciation as a voiceless labiodental fricative ([f]). The romanization of the Modern Greek phoneme is therefore usually ⟨f⟩.

It may be that phi originated as the letter qoppa (Ϙ, ϙ), and initially represented the sound /kʷʰ/ before shifting to Classical Greek [pʰ].^[2] In traditional Greek numerals, phi has a value of 500 (φʹ) or 500,000 (͵φ). The Cyrillic letter Ef (Ф, ф) descends from phi.

Like other Greek letters, lowercase phi (encoded as the Unicode character U+03C6 φ GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI) is used as a mathematical or scientific symbol. Some uses^{[example needed]} require the old-fashioned 'closed' glyph, which is separately encoded as the Unicode character U+03D5 ϕ GREEK PHI SYMBOL.

^ "phi". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
^ Brixhe, C. "History of the Alphabet", in Christidēs & al.'s A History of Ancient Greek. 2007.

[1] "phi". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)

[2] Brixhe, C. "History of the Alphabet", in Christidēs & al.'s A History of Ancient Greek. 2007.

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