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Chi (letter)

Twenty-second letter of the Greek alphabet

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The letter's origins are uncertain. Although its shape closely resembles the Phoenician letter taw 𐤕 (whence Greek tau Τ), it is believed to derive from a variant of kappa; its sound value was represented with the digraphs ΚΗ and ϘΗ in the Southern Greek alphabet.

Greek

Pronunciation

Ancient Greek

Its value in Ancient Greek was originally an aspirated velar stop (in the Western Greek alphabet: /ks/). It later became a fricative (/) along with Θ and Φ.

Modern Greek

In Modern Greek, it has two distinct pronunciations: In front of high or front vowels ( or ) it is pronounced as a voiceless palatal fricative , which sounds similar to "h" in English words like hew and human and is equivalent to the German ich-Laut as in dich. In front of low or back vowels (, or ) and consonants, it is pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative (), like the German ach-Laut as in Bach or the Spanish j.

Transliteration

Chi is romanized as ⟨ch⟩ in most systematic transliteration conventions, but sometimes ⟨kh⟩ is used. In addition, in Modern Greek, it is often also romanized as ⟨h⟩ or ⟨x⟩ in informal practice.

Greek numeral

In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 600.

Xi

In ancient times, some local forms of the Greek alphabet used the chi instead of xi to represent the /ks/ sound. This was borrowed into the early Latin language, which led to the use of the letter X for the same sound in Latin, and many modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.

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