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Looking at the Unicode Character Database, I noticed that the λ character, which is usually called "lambda" in English, is in fact spelled "lamda" (or GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA, to be exact).

Even though I understand that the transliteration of λ in Modern Greek is "lamda", what were the official reasons for using the less common name, especially for other characters, like MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL LAMDA, which do not have the other version of the character name at all?

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  • See this reference. – AFH Dec 29 '18 at 16:42
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    Wikipedia (thank you @AFH) links to this. All three were spelled "LAMBDA" in Unicode 1.0. 039B/03BB were changed to "LAMDA" as part of the synchronization with 10646-1 in 1993. And those changes were motivated by the pre-existing names in ISO 8859-7, as I mentioned before, as well as by preferences expressed by the Greek National Body. It doesn't look opinion-based. I'm voting to reopen the question. – Kamil Maciorowski Dec 29 '18 at 20:39
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    @ThomasDickey - Yes, it does, in the first sentence of the section. – AFH Dec 29 '18 at 21:36

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