History of the Greek alphabet only required one. The history here is complicated, but basically "sāmekh" dropped out in certain dialects, and was reused to represent in others, while usage for the sound varied between "ṣādē" and "šin". The letter now known as sigma took its name from "sāmekh" but its form from "šin", while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from "šin" but its place in the alphabet from "ṣādē". A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate, such as . For the special case of zeta, see Zeta
Greek alphabet Caroline Winterer states is "understandable, considering that general knowledge of the ancient Greek alphabet and language has almost entirely vanished." Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in Unicode. For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in . The two principal ones still used today are ISO/IEC 8859-7 and Unicode. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the