The / w/ sound was lost at various times in various dialects, mostly before the classical period. It is also confirmed by the Hittite name of Troy, Wilusa, corresponding to the Greek name * Wilion, classical Ilion (Ilium). The sound /w/ existed in Mycenean Greek, as attested in Linear B and archaic Greek inscriptions using digamma. The inscription reads Ι ϜΑΝΑΚΤΙ (i wanakti), 'to the king', with an initial digamma (and a local Σ-shaped form for iota). Greek w Mycenaean Greek Ancient Greek ceramic fragment depicting a horse with rider. In modern Greek, this is often replaced by the digraph στ. 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'. The shape of the letter went through a development from through, ,, to or, which at that point was conflated with the σ-τ ligature. As an alphabetic letter, it is attested in archaic and dialectal ancient Greek inscriptions until the classical period. Digamma or wau is in turn the ancestor of the Latin letter F. It is the consonantal doublet of the vowel letter upsilon ( /u/), which was also derived from waw but was placed near the end of the Greek alphabet. Like its model, Phoenician waw, it represented the voiced labial-velar approximant /w/ and stood in the 6th position in the alphabet between epsilon and zeta. 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 after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ.ĭigamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician.

It originally stood for the sound / w/ but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6.

Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet.

Ancient greek glyph