Coptic Capital Letter Pi

Ⲡ is Coptic capital pi, a letter for the p sound. Its Greek relative Π is a different character.

Text symbol

What Ⲡ means

It marks the p sound in a Coptic word. Other letters complete the word’s meaning.

Attempts to spell Egyptian with Greek letters began near the end of the fourth century BCE. Demotic, an older Egyptian script, supplied signs for sounds Greek lacked; Ⲡ comes from Greek pi. Egyptian papyri in the first and second centuries CE preserve Greek-letter glosses that show pronunciation. By the third century, Coptic was a working alphabet for Christian scripture. After the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE, Arabic gradually displaced Coptic in daily speech, while Coptic continued in church and scholarship.

Part of the collection

Ⲁ

Coptic Alphabet & Letters

Who writes Ⲡ

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Don't confuse it with

Greek Capital Letter Pi

Ⲡ vs Π: separate Coptic and Greek characters. Without Coptic font support, Ⲡ may be missing; some fonts draw them alike.

Questions people ask

Why does Ⲡ show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.