Coptic Alphabet & Letters

Coptic is the last stage of the language of ancient Egypt, the same language once written in hieroglyphs, but written in an alphabet. From around the 3rd century, Egyptian Christians wrote it with the Greek alphabet, which they already knew, and added letters for Egyptian sounds Greek could not spell. Those extra letters were taken from Demotic, the cursive late form of Egyptian writing, so every Coptic text still carries a little of the pharaohs' script.

The grid above follows the order of the Bohairic alphabet used by the Coptic Church: the 25 letters from Greek, Ⲁ Ⲃ Ⲅ Ⲇ Ⲉ Ⲋ Ⲍ Ⲏ Ⲑ Ⲓ Ⲕ Ⲗ Ⲙ Ⲛ Ⲝ Ⲟ Ⲡ Ⲣ Ⲥ Ⲧ Ⲩ Ⲫ Ⲭ Ⲯ Ⲱ, then the seven from Demotic, Ϣ Ϥ Ϧ Ϩ Ϫ Ϭ Ϯ. The letter names are the Coptic ones, which is why Unicode calls Ⲃ vida and Ⲏ hate: Ⲁ alfa, Ⲃ vida, Ⲅ gamma, Ⲇ dalda, Ⲉ eie, Ⲍ zata, Ⲏ hate, Ⲑ thethe, Ⲓ iauda and so on to Ⲱ oou. Ⲋ (sou) is not used in words at all; it survives only as the number 6.

Coptic was historically caseless and written in rounded uncial forms; its capital and small letter forms are modern conventions: ⲁ ⲃ ⲅ ⲇ correspond to Ⲁ Ⲃ Ⲅ Ⲇ. These are real Coptic characters, not Greek ones: Ⲁ is U+2C80, Greek Α is U+0391, and a Coptic font or search engine treats them as different letters.

Coptic letters and their sounds: Ϣ Ϥ Ϧ Ϩ Ϫ Ϭ Ϯ

The seven Egyptian letters write sounds Greek lacked: ϣ shei is sh, ϥ fei is f, ϧ khei is a throaty kh like German Bach, ϩ hori is h, ϫ gangia is j (dj), ϭ shima is ch or ky, and ϯ dei is ti, a fused t + i. Ϧ belongs to Bohairic, the dialect of the north that the church reads today; Sahidic, the classical dialect of Upper Egypt, has only six of them and writes ϩ where Bohairic has ϧ.

Ϯ is one of the most common letters in Bohairic, because it is also the feminine word "the": ϯϩⲓⲣⲏⲛⲏ (ti-hirini) is "the peace" and Ⲫ̀ⲛⲟⲩϯ (Efnouti) is God. The name Egypt in Coptic is Ⲭⲏⲙⲓ (Kēmi, the black land), and the language calls itself ϯⲙⲉⲧⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, the language of the people of Egypt.

Two marks ride above the letters. The jinkim ( ̀ ), a small stroke or dot in Bohairic, sits on a letter that forms a syllable by itself, often a vowel or an n or m with no vowel of its own: ⲛ̀, ⲙ̀, as in Ⲡⲓⲭ̀ⲣⲓⲥⲧⲟⲥ (Pikhristos, Christ). Unicode text usually stores it as the combining grave accent U+0300. The supralinear stroke ( ̅ ), a line over letters, marks a syllabic consonant in Sahidic, shortens sacred names like Ⲓⲏ̅ⲥ̅ (Jesus) and turns letters into numbers. Both are combining marks: paste them right after the letter they belong on.

Pronunciation is a debated subject in its own right. Church readers in Egypt today mostly follow the Greco-Bohairic reading taught since the 19th century, which says Ⲃ as v and Ⲫ as f; scholars reconstructing older Bohairic read several letters differently, Ⲫ for example as p plus h, and many Coptic Christians also know an older traditional reading. The labels in the grid give the common church sounds.

Coptic numbers 1–10 and the epact numerals

Coptic counts with letters, the way Greek did: a letter with a stroke above it is a number. ⲁ̅ ⲃ̅ ⲅ̅ ⲇ̅ ⲉ̅ ⲋ̅ ⲍ̅ ⲏ̅ ⲑ̅ ⲓ̅ are 1 to 10, ⲕ̅ ⲗ̅ ⲙ̅ ⲛ̅ ⲝ̅ ⲟ̅ ⲡ̅ ϥ̅ are 20 to 90 and ⲣ̅ ⲥ̅ ⲧ̅ ⲩ̅ ⲫ̅ ⲭ̅ ⲯ̅ ⲱ̅ ⳁ̅ are 100 to 900. Two of the number letters are not ordinary letters: Ⲋ sou (6) and the Coptic letter Ⳁ sampi (900), derived from Greek sampi; and 90 is written with the Egyptian letter Ϥ, which took the place of the Greek koppa. Larger numbers are written by sums, highest first: 12 is ⲓ̅ⲃ̅, 365 is ⲧ̅ⲝ̅ⲉ̅.

The Coptic epact numbers 𐋡 𐋢 𐋣 … 𐋻 form a separate decimal notation using cursive forms of Coptic letters, distinct from the alphabetic numeral system. They are found in some Coptic-Arabic manuscripts and accounting documents, so Unicode gave them their own block (U+102E0 to U+102FF) in 2014: nine digits, nine tens, nine hundreds and a thousands mark 𐋠.

The spoken numbers 1 to 10 in Bohairic are ⲟⲩⲁⲓ (ouai), ⲥ̀ⲛⲁⲩ (snau), ϣⲟⲙⲧ (shomt), ϥ̀ⲧⲟⲟⲩ (ftoou), ⲧⲓⲟⲩ (tiou), ⲥⲟⲟⲩ (soou), ϣⲁϣϥ (shashf), ϣ̀ⲙⲏⲛ (shmēn), ⲯⲓⲧ (psit) and ⲙⲏⲧ (mēt), the masculine forms. Several still echo ancient Egyptian, and three use the Demotic letters ϣ and ϥ.

Coptic cross and Coptic symbols to copy and paste

There is no dedicated Coptic cross emoji. Unicode does encode the Coptic symbol stauros ⳧, meaning “cross.” The familiar equal-armed cross has arms ending in three points or knobs; it is carved on church doors and tattooed on the inner wrist of many Coptic Christians. When people paste one, they use the closest shapes: ☩ (cross of Jerusalem), ✠ (Maltese cross), or the plain cross emoji ✝️. ⛪ and 🕯️ round off a church greeting.

☥, the ankh, belongs here too: the ancient Egyptian sign of life was taken up by early Egyptian Christians as a cross with a loop, the crux ansata, and appears in Coptic textiles and grave stones.

The Coptic block also has the abbreviations of manuscripts. ⳤ stands for ⲕⲁⲓ, "and". ⳧ is the stauros, the cross, and ⳨ the tau-rho, a cross whose upright is a rho, one of the oldest Christian monograms. ⳩ is the chi-rho, the first letters of Christ, and ⳥ ⳦ ⳪ are further monograms. For punctuation, Coptic manuscripts used a raised dot · and Unicode adds the Coptic full stop ⳾ and the morphological divider ⳿; printed church books today use . , : ? like Western text.

How to type Coptic letters: keyboard and fonts

Coptic is not among the keyboards that most computers and phones offer out of the box, so the easiest way is to copy from this page: tap a letter, then paste. For regular typing, install a free Coptic keyboard layout for Windows or Mac (Keyman is one way to get one) or a Coptic keyboard app on Android or iPhone; most put Coptic letters on similar-sounding Latin keys, so a gives ⲁ and b gives ⲃ; Shift+a and Shift+b give Ⲁ and Ⲃ. There are no classic Alt codes for Coptic, but in Microsoft Word you can type a letter's code and press Alt+X: 2C80 Alt+X gives Ⲁ, 3E2 Alt+X gives Ϣ.

Make sure the result is Unicode. Many church books and older documents were typed in pre-Unicode Coptic fonts, such as the CS fonts, that draw Coptic shapes on ordinary Latin letters; the text turns into Latin gibberish when the font changes or is pasted into a chat. That is what "Coptic font converters" are for. Unicode Coptic sits in the Coptic block U+2C80 to U+2CFF, with the seven Demotic letters Ϣ to ϯ at U+03E2 to U+03EF inside the Greek and Coptic block. Fonts that show it well include Antinoou and Noto Sans Coptic.

In HTML you can write any letter by its number: Ⲁ gives Ⲁ, Ϣ gives Ϣ and ϯ gives ϯ. For the jinkim and the stroke, type the letter, then the combining mark (̀ or ̅).

Where Coptic is used today

Coptic stopped being an everyday spoken language centuries ago; Arabic replaced it in Egypt after the Arab conquest, and it had faded from village speech by around the 17th century. It lives on as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church 🇪🇬: Bohairic hymns and prayers are used in liturgies alongside Arabic or other local languages, and children learn the letters in church classes. CLDR's population table lists about 6.7 million for Coptic in Egypt as an approximate language-population estimate, not a count of worshippers or mother-tongue speakers, and a few families and revival groups do try to speak it at home.

Coptic is also a working language of scholarship: most Nag Hammadi texts and much early Egyptian monastic literature, including Shenoute’s writings, are in Sahidic Coptic, and Egyptologists learn Coptic because it shows the vowels that hieroglyphs never wrote.

Related pages: the Greek collection for the alphabet Coptic grew from, Egyptian Arabic and Arabic for the language Egypt speaks today, and the Egypt collection for the 🇪🇬 flag, the Egyptian pound £ and Egyptian emoji.