History of the Greek alphabet consonant letter, rather than seemingly have two exceptions in spelling. Greek, like Phoenician, made a distinction for vowel length; indeed, Greek had five short vowels and seven long vowels, but only five vowel letters. As in Phoenician, the difference in length was not originally made in writing. However, by the 6th century BC the letter eta (not needed for a consonant in eastern dialects of Greek, which lacked ) came to stand for the long vowel , and a new letter, omega, was developed for long . The provenance of omega is not known, but it is generally assumed to
Xi (letter) Xi (letter) Xi (uppercase Ξ, lowercase ξ; ) is the 14th letter of the Greek alphabet. It is pronounced in Modern Greek, and generally or in English. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 60. Xi was derived from the Phoenician letter samekh . Xi is not to be confused with the letter chi, which gave its form to the Latin letter X. Both in classical Ancient Greek and in Modern Greek, the letter Ξ represents the sound . In some archaic local variants of the Greek alphabet, this letter was missing. Instead, especially in the