Like the names of most other Greek letters, the name of beta was adopted from theacrophonic name of the corresponding letter inPhoenician, which was the commonSemitic word*bayt ('house', compareArabic:بيتbayt andHebrew:ביתbáyit). In Greek, the name wasβῆταbêta, pronounced[bɛ̂ːta] in Ancient Greek. It is spelledβήτα in modern monotonic orthography and pronounced[ˈvita].
The letter Β had the largest number of highly divergent local forms. Besides the standard form (either rounded or pointed,), there were forms as varied as (Gortyn), and (Thera), (Argos), (Melos), (Corinth), (Megara,Byzantium), and (Cyclades).[3]
Beta is used in finance as a measure of investment portfolio risk.[4] Beta in this context is calculated as the covariance of the portfolio's returns with its benchmark's returns, divided by the variance of the benchmark's returns. A beta of 1.5 means that for every 1% change in the value of the benchmark, the portfolio's value tends to change by 1.5%.
Beta is often used to denote a variable in mathematics and physics, where it often has specific meanings for certain applications.
β is sometimes used as a placeholder for anordinal number if α is already used. For example, the two roots of aquadratic equation are typically labelledα andβ.
Beta male, or simplybeta, is a slang term for men derived from the designation for beta animals in ethology, along with its counterpart,alpha male.[8][9] The term has been used as a pejorative self-identifier among members ofmanosphere communities, particularlyincels, who do not believe they are assertive or traditionallymasculine, and feel overlooked by women.[10][11] It is also used to negatively describe other men who are not assertive, particularly inheterosexual relationships.
In some high-quality typesetting, especially in the French tradition, a typographic variant of the lowercase letter without adescender is used within a word forancient Greek:βίβλος is printedβίϐλος.[13]
In typesetting technical literature, it is a commonly made mistake to use theGerman letter ß (a s–z or s–s ligature) as a replacement for β. The two letters resemble each other in some fonts, but they are unrelated.[14]
"Beta" can be used to refer to several consumer and professional videotape formats developed by Japan'sSony Corporation. Although similarly named, they are very different in function and obsolescence.
Betamax was the name of a domestic videotape format developed in the 1970s and 1980s. It competed with the Video Home System (VHS) format developed by theJapanese Victor Company, to which it eventually succumbed. The Betamax format was also marketedBetacord by (Sanyo); some cassettes were simply labeled "Beta", and the logo was a lower-case beta. Betamax lost in the market and is an oft-used example of a technically superior solution that failed due to market forces.
Betacam, including Beta SP and DigiBeta, is a family of professional videotape formats launched in 1982 that was the de facto standard for professional video, advertising, and television production through the 2000s. The formats outlasted analogNTSC television, and their scarcity today is because the industry has moved toHD formats.
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style:
U+1D6A9𝚩MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL BETA
U+1D6C3𝛃MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL BETA
U+1D6E3𝛣MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL BETA
U+1D6FD𝛽MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL BETA
U+1D71D𝜝MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL BETA
U+1D737𝜷MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL BETA
U+1D757𝝗MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL BETA
U+1D771𝝱MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD SMALL BETA
U+1D791𝞑MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL BETA
U+1D7AB𝞫MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC SMALL BETA
^Jeffery, Lilian Hamilton (1961).The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece. Oxford University Press. p. 23.
^Weisstein, Eric W."Beta".mathworld.wolfram.com. Retrieved2025-01-22.A financial measure of a fund's sensitivity to market movements which measures the relationship between a fund's excess return over Treasury Bills and the excess return of a benchmark index (which, by definition, has ß=1)
^Jones, Callum; Trott, Verity; Wright, Scott (2020). "Sluts and soyboys: MGTOW and the production of misogynistic online harassment".New Media & Society.22 (10):1903–1921.doi:10.1177/1461444819887141.ISSN1461-4448.S2CID210530415.
^Bhandari, Pritha (2021-01-18)."Type I & Type II Errors | Differences, Examples, Visualizations".Scribbr. Retrieved2025-01-22.The probability of making a Type I error is the significance level, or alpha (α), while the probability of making a Type II error is beta (β).
