Greek Small Letter Heta

Greek Small Letter Heta at U+0371 is a lowercase Greek letter used for the archaic consonant heta, a historical sign for an h sound. It belongs to the Greek and Coptic block and is not part of ordinary modern Greek spelling. Its main use is in scholarly editions, epigraphy, paleography, and linguistic writing about early Greek alphabets. Researchers use it when transcribing inscriptions or discussing dialects where the old letter represented rough breathing, such as an initial h sound before a vowel in words that later Greek might mark only with a breathing sign. It also appears in Unicode-aware databases, museum catalogues, fonts for ancient scripts, and academic articles that need a distinct lowercase form paired with capital heta. In practice, readers are most likely to encounter it in specialist material comparing archaic Greek letterforms, not in everyday Greek text or standard mathematical notation.