Greek Small Letter Archaic Koppa

Greek Small Letter Archaic Koppa at U+03D9 is a lowercase archaic Greek letter in the Greek and Coptic block, used to represent an early form of koppa rather than a modern Greek sound. It belongs to historical and scholarly Greek text, where it records a letter that disappeared from ordinary alphabetic writing. Its main use is in editions, transcriptions, and discussions of early Greek inscriptions, especially material from dialects that kept koppa before back vowels. In such contexts, koppa may appear in names, city legends on coins, or epigraphic texts to show the original spelling rather than normalizing it to kappa. The character is also used in classical studies, paleography, numismatics, and Unicode plain-text encoding when a source distinguishes archaic koppa from the later numeral-style koppa. It is not the standard modern Greek letter kappa, and it is separate from the Greek koppa symbol used for the number 90 in Greek numeral notation. Because it is specialized, it may be missing or poorly differentiated in some general-purpose fonts. Readers often encounter it in academic databases, museum catalogues, inscription corpora, and articles about the development of the Greek alphabet.