Coptic Capital Letter Hate

It is a Coptic letter for writing, not a message of hostility.

“Hate” is the letter’s name, not its meaning. Coptic is a later form of Egyptian, written mostly with Greek letters plus signs adapted from Demotic, an older Egyptian script, for sounds Greek lacked. Papyri already used Greek letters to write Egyptian by the first–second centuries CE, partly to record its pronunciation; Coptic later became a language of Christian scripture and worship.

Why does Ⲏ look like Greek eta?

Ⲏ follows the Greek eta tradition.

The relationship is historical, not just visual: Unicode distinguished Coptic and Greek characters in Unicode 4.1. As of 2026, a font can still make Ⲏ and Η look alike, so the surrounding Coptic or Greek text is the practical clue.