The website states that scientific names can be difficult to recall and hence often lend themselves to misreporting. Experts around the world had convened to come to the decision. The WHO website states that Greek alphabets have been chosen to name Covid-19 variants as they are easy to say and remember. Why is WHO using Greek alphabets to name Covid-19 variants? The B.1.640.2 has not been identified in other countries so far or labelled a variant under investigation by the WHO. Scientists in France have now identified a new, much more mutated strain- named IHU B.1.640.2 variant. Among them were Epsilon, Iota and Lambda. CNN reported that Delta was followed by eight others who had fizzled out for the most part.
The WHO has been using Greek alphabets to name Covid-19 variants, the one before Omicron having been termed the Delta variant.
The variant is pronounced differently in both US and the UK. It was named by the World Health Organisation (WHO) after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. ‘Omicron’ comes from Middle English, from Greek o mikron, literally meaning ‘small o’.
#Omicron greek letter movie
There were memes being made, Google searches on the pronunciation of the Greek letter Omicron, crypto tokens with the same name surging, bands called Omicron rising from obscurity and various doctored images floating around claiming this comic strip or that movie had “predicted” the variant. Rachel Quin is a freelance marketer and copywriter with a love of language, books and cats.Īll opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.When the Omicron variant of Covid-19 first came to light, its etymology created quite a stir on social media. So we might eventually see Aries, Libra, and Capricorn outside of the horoscope section. But according to Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 Technical Lead, if we do manage to exhaust the alphabet, star constellations are next in line. There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, two fewer than in English, which means we’ve got a way to go before we need to consider a new naming convention. The WHO also made the decision to skip the letters nu and xi: nu, because it’s very easy to hear as ‘new’, and xi because Xi is a common surname. Since then, while other variants have occurred and been given labels, they have since been downgraded and become variants to be monitored. However, three previous variants discovered in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil were given names retroactively. You may remember in early 2021, Delta emerged as the first variant referred to by its Greek label.
If we’re using the Greek alphabet to name COVID-19 variants, how are we so far into it already? When the WHO announced the naming convention, they also said that labels will only be assigned to Variants of Interest or Variants of Concern. 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.
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