Greek Beta Code
A scheme for writing polytonic Greek with a plain keyboard, still standard across digital corpora decades after the constraint that produced it disappeared.
What It Is
Beta Code represents every Greek letter, accent and breathing using ASCII characters only. It was developed for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the digital corpus of Greek literature, at a time when computers could not reliably handle Greek characters at all.
Unicode solved that problem, but Beta Code did not go away. Large corpora are still stored and searched in it, many search interfaces still accept it, and a great deal of scholarly apparatus assumes it. If you work with digital Greek texts you will meet it.
The Basic Scheme
Letters map to their Latin equivalents, entered as capitals: A is alpha, B is beta, G is gamma, D is delta, E is epsilon. The ones worth memorising are where the mapping is not obvious. H is eta, not a breathing. W is omega. Q is theta. C is xi. Y is psi. U is upsilon.
Sigma has three forms: S alone, S1 for medial and S2 for final, though most tools accept plain S and choose the form from position.
Accents and Breathings
Diacritics follow the letter as punctuation. A right parenthesis is the smooth breathing and a left parenthesis is the rough. A forward slash is the acute, a backslash the grave, an equals sign the circumflex. The iota subscript is a vertical bar.
So lo/gos is λόγος, and )/anqrwpos is ἄνθρωπος, with a smooth breathing and an acute on the initial alpha. The order is fixed: breathing before accent.
Why It Matters for Isopsephy
Directly, because it is how you get Greek text out of a corpus and into a calculator. Indirectly, because it makes an important point about accents.
Beta Code encodes every diacritic explicitly, which makes it obvious that they are separate from the letters. In isopsephy none of them carries a value. Breathings, accents, the iota subscript and the diaeresis are all stripped before counting, so a word gives the same total whether you enter it accented or bare. If a calculator returns different totals for the two, it is counting the marks.
Converting to Real Greek
Most tools that accept Beta Code will also render it, and several free converters exist. The practical workflow when you want a value: paste the Beta Code into a converter, take the Unicode Greek out, and paste that into the calculator. There is no need to strip the accents yourself.
If you are typing directly rather than copying from a corpus, entering bare unaccented Greek is faster and gives the same result. The accents matter for reading and for scholarship; for arithmetic they are inert.
The Related Archaic Letters
Beta Code covers the numeral-only letters too, since corpora contain them. Digamma, qoppa and sampi hold the 6, 90 and 900 positions in the Milesian numeral system despite having left ordinary writing, which is how the 24 letter alphabet fills 27 numeral slots. The Greek chart lists all of them with their values.
Paste any Greek text, accented or bare, into the isopsephy calculator for its value, or read the Greek lesson for how the system worked. To read a numeral as a number instead, use the numerals converter.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Beta Code used for?
Representing polytonic Greek in plain ASCII. It was built for the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and remains standard in many digital Greek corpora and search interfaces.
How do you write accents in Beta Code?
As punctuation after the letter: ) is smooth breathing, ( is rough, / is acute, a backslash is grave, = is circumflex, and | is the iota subscript. Breathing comes before accent.
Do Beta Code accents affect a gematria value?
No. Accents, breathings and the iota subscript carry no numeric value in isopsephy and are stripped before the letters are counted.
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