Epsilon (/ˈɛpsɪlɒn/, uppercase Ε, lowercase ε or ϵ; Greek: έψιλον) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowelIPA:[e̞] or IPA:[ɛ̝]. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letterHe. Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э. The name of the letter was originally εἶ (eî[êː]), but it was later changed to ἒ ψιλόν (è psilón 'simple e') in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter from the digraph⟨αι⟩, a former diphthong that had come to be pronounced [e], and because the digraph ⟨ει⟩ had become unsuitable due to its own shift to [i]. In Modern Greek, its name has fused into έψιλον (épsilon).
The uppercase form of epsilon is identical to Latin ⟨E⟩ but has its own code point in Unicode: U+0395ΕGREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON. 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 a reversed number "3" and is encoded U+03B5εGREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON. The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar: it is encoded U+03F5ϵGREEK LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL. While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols: computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them. In TeX, \epsilon ( ) denotes the lunate form, while \varepsilon ( ) denotes the epsilon number. Unicode versions 2.0.0 and onwards use ɛ as the lowercase Greek epsilon letter, but in version 1.0.0, ϵ was used. The lunate or uncial epsilon provided inspiration for the euro sign, €.