Editing Digamma (section)

{{Short description|Archaic letter of the Greek alphabet}}
{{About|the Greek letter|the mathematical function|digamma function}}
{{redirect|Ͷ|the Cyrillic letter|I (Cyrillic)}}
{{pp-semi|small=yes}}
{{Greek Alphabet|Image=Digamma Stigma.svg}}

'''Digamma''' or '''wau''' (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an [[Archaic Greek alphabets|archaic letter]] of the [[Greek alphabet]]. It originally stood for the sound {{IPAslink|w}} but it has remained in use principally as a [[Greek numeral]] for [[6 (number)|6]]. Whereas it was originally called ''waw'' or ''wau'', its most common appellation in classical Greek is ''digamma''; as a numeral, it was called ''episēmon'' during the Byzantine era and is now known as ''[[stigma (letter)|stigma]]'' after the [[Greek ligature|Byzantine ligature]] combining σ-τ  as ϛ.

Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from [[Phoenician alphabet|Phoenician]]. Like its model, Phoenician [[Waw (letter)|waw]], it represented the [[voiced labial-velar approximant]] {{IPA|/w/}} and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between [[epsilon]] and [[zeta]]. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter [[upsilon]] ({{IPA|/u/}}), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the [[Latin alphabet|Latin letter]] [[F (letter)|F]]. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic and dialectal [[Ancient Greek language|ancient Greek]] [[inscription]]s until the classical period.

The shape of the letter went through a development from <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma oblique.svg|x16px]]</span> through <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma 05.svg|x16px]]</span>, <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma angular.svg|x16px]]</span>, <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma cursive 01.svg|x16px]]</span>, <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma cursive 02.svg|x16px]]</span> to <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma cursive 05.svg|x16px]]</span> or <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma cursive 06.svg|x16px]]</span>, which at that point was conflated with the σ-τ ligature <span style="background-color: white;">[[File:Greek Digamma cursive 07.svg|x16px]]</span>. In modern print, a distinction is made between the letter in its original alphabetic role as a consonant sign, which is rendered as "Ϝ" or its modern lowercase variant "ϝ", and the numeric symbol, which is represented by "ϛ". In [[modern Greek]], this is often replaced by the digraph {{lang|el|στ}}.