Page "Epsilon" Paragraph 2

The uppercase form of epsilon looks essentially identical to Latin E. The lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting.

One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like an inverted " 3 ".

The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar.

While in normal typography these are just alternate font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols.

Computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them.

In Unicode, the character U + 03F5 " Greek lunate epsilon symbol " () is provided specifically for the lunate form.

In TeX, () denotes the lunate form, while () denotes the inverted-3 form.