Depending on whether or not you studied ancient Greek – and no, reading The Secret History doesn’t count – the new Omicron variant is pronounced either O-me-cron or OH-my-cron. One of the biggest points of contention around omicron is how you actually pronounce it. In fact, the word ‘alphabet’ itself is derived from ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet was first developed around 1000 BC and has directly or indirectly influenced all modern European alphabets.
What does omicron mean? Literally, the word means “small o”, and refers to the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet, which is in turn derived from the Phoenician letter ‘ayin’. It can be much easier to fall back on referring to a variant by the country where it was first detected – not necessarily where it actually originated – which therefore creates the problem of stigma.īut let’s go back to the roots. Realistically, media outlets are unlikely to keep referring to variants by their official tags, such as the B.1.1.7 or the B.1.351 variant. According to their website, scientific names can be difficult to say and record, leading to misreporting. With so much conversation around COVID-19 in the public sphere, the WHO made the decision to make the referencing of variants as simple as possible. In May 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that COVID-19 variants would be labelled using letters of the Greek alphabet. If you’ve watched the news or spent any time online lately, you might have heard the word omicron and wondered where it came from. Quite literally, it’s the Greek alphabet.