Omicron

[Alan W]

There are several goals which can be aimed for in deciding such issues - and they tend to be in conflict with each other. There is the goal of consistency. There is the goal of minimising the likelihood that a player will miss playing a common word because they've never heard of it. And I've recently been drawn to the Hippocratic goal of doing no harm - that is, leaving things as they are unless it seems certain a change will improve things.

On the current question, when the Greek letter names were first discussed in 2009, I commented that it was hard to know where to draw the line between common and rare in the Greek alphabet. Hence, I achieved consistency by changing zeta from rare to common. All the other letter names long enough for the puzzle, including omicron, were already common.

But when omicron last appeared in a daily puzzle, on 12 August, only 59 people played it: about one seventh of the players that day. It's hard to know how to interpret that, because it's a tricky word to think of, even if you know the word. But it seems likely that some players simply were not familiar with the word. Word usage frequencies show that omicron and upsilon are used far less often than any of the other members of the Greek alphabet. And I don't think those two words have any non-technical uses, except in relation to the fraternity societies, etc, in the US.

I conclude that omicron and upsilon should be rare in future. I'm not sure about some of the others, such as zeta, but applying the "do no harm" principle, I'll leave them as common until I'm persuaded otherwise.

[Calilasseia]

It's not merely students of Classical Greek that will regard these letters as familiar, but astronomers. The first 26 stars in a constellation are assigned Greek letters, followed by the genitive form of the containing constellation, in order of magnitude (with a few historical errors persisting).

For example, in the constellation Orion, the star Betelgeuse is Alpha Orionis, and Rigel is Beta Orionis. When these were named for their status in the constellation in the Bayer Catalogue, Betelgeuse was visibly brighter than Rigel, but of course, Betelgeuse has since been found to be a variable star whose magnitude fluctuates over long periods of time.

Among the notable 'omicrons' are:

Omicron Cephei - close binary star system

Omicron Persei - triple star system

Omicron Ursae Majoris - star with an exoplanet known to be orbiting it

Omicron¹ Eridani - variable star of the Delta Scuti class, with rapid rotation and large equatorial bulge

Omicron¹ Canis Majoris  - distant red supergiant and irregular variable star

Incidentally, returning to Classical Greek for a moment, omicron and omega, the two letters for o-type vowel sounds in Greek words, are named appropriately for the type of vowel sound - omicron (o-micron) is for short (small) o-vowel sounds, and omega (o-mega) for long (large) o-vowel sounds.

For those who love minutiae of this sort, these two vowels can also be found written with what is known as the 'iota subscript' directly underneath. The use of an iota subscript to denote a following iota has had numerous hilarious consequences, courtesy of the fact that an iota subscript can be mistaken for a dirt mark on a papyrus, resulting in translation controversies.

[birdy]

In addition to the term "alpha and omega," I've seen the words (especially alpha) used very frequently in romance novels, especially in the paranormal sub-genre.  I'm kind of getting tired of reading blurbs describing, e.g., "the alpha billionaire's secret baby."  I wish they'd think up some new plots.  "Omega" seems to be used mostly in shifter (were animal) themed novels, but I've seen it used increasingly in the last few years.

[jancsika]

It's common now!   

[birdy]

Sure changed in just a few days, hasn't it?