This article is about Greek iota; it is not to be confused withJota.For Latin iota, seeɩ. For Cyrillic Iota, seeIota (Cyrillic). For other uses, seeIota (disambiguation).Not to be confused withYota.
Iota represents theclose front unrounded vowelIPA:[i]. In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long[iː] and short[i] versions, but this distinction was lost inKoine Greek.[4] Iota participated as the second element infalling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written inpolytonic orthography asiota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs becamedigraphs for simple vowels inKoine Greek.[4]
The word is used in a common English phrase, "not one iota", meaning "not the slightest amount". This refers to iota, the smallest letter, or possiblyyodh, י, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet.[5][6] The English wordjot derives from iota.[7] The German, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish name for the letter J (Jot /jota) is derived from iota.
In someprogramming languages (e.g.,A+,APL,C++,[8]Go[9]), iota (either as the lowercase symbol⍳ or the identifieriota) is used to represent and generate an array of consecutive integers. For example, in APL⍳4 gives1 2 3 4.[10]
The lowercase iota symbol is sometimes used to write theimaginary unit, but more often Romani orj is used.
Inmathematics, theinclusion map of one space into another is sometimes denoted by the lowercase iota.
U+1D798𝞘MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL IOTA
U+1D7B2𝞲MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC SMALL IOTA
^TheMATHEMATICAL symbols are only for use in math. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.
^Darlington, John, ed. (1991).Functional programming and its applications: an advanced course (Xerographic reprint [d. Ausg.] Cambridge 1982 ed.). Ann Arbor, Mich: University Microfilms International. p. 76.ISBN978-0-521-24503-6.iota The APL ι operator: iota apply to an integern produces a sequence ofn consecutive integers starting from 1;
