In early Greek alphabets, the shape and orientation of lambda varied.[3] Most variants consisted of two straight strokes, one longer than the other, connected at their ends. The angle might be in the upper-left, lower-left ("Western" alphabets) or top ("Eastern" alphabets). Other variants had a vertical line with a horizontal or sloped stroke running to the right. With the general adoption of the Ionic alphabet, Greek settled on an angle at the top; the Romans put the angle at the lower-left.
The HTML 4 character entity references for the Greek capital and small letter lambda are Λ and λ respectively.[4] The Unicode code points for lambda are U+039B and U+03BB.
The Greek alphabet on a black figurevessel, with a Phoenician-lamed-shaped lambda. The gamma has the shape of modern lambda.
In statistics, Wilks's lambda is used in multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA analysis) to compare group means on a combination of dependent variables.
In crystal optics, lambda is used to represent a lattice period.
In NATO military operations, a chevron (a heraldic symbol which looks like a capital letter lambda or inverted V) is painted on the vehicles of this military alliance for identification.
In evolutionary algorithms, λ indicates the number of offspring that would be generated from μ current population in each generation. The terms μ and λ are originated from Evolution strategy notation.
In ecology, lambda denotes the long-term intrinsic growth rate of a population. This value is often calculated as the dominant eigenvalue of the age/size class matrix.
In criminology, lambda denotes an individual's frequency of offences.
In electrochemistry, lambda also denotes the ionic conductance of a given ion (the composition of the ion is generally shown as a subscript to the lambda character).
In 1970, a lowercase lambda was chosen by Tom Doerr as the symbol of the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance.[11][12] The lambda symbol became associated with Gay Liberation[13][14] and recognized as an LGBT symbol for some time afterwards, being used as such by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh.[15]
Litra symbol
The Romanlibra and Byzantinelítra (λίτρα), which served as both the pound mass unit and liter volume unit, were abbreviated in Greek using lambda with modified forms of the iota subscript ⟨λͅ⟩. These are variously encoded in Unicode. The Ancient Greek NumbersUnicode block includes 10183 GREEK LITRA SIGN (𐆃) as well as 𐅢, which is described as 10162 GREEK ACROPHONIC HERMIONIAN TEN[16] but was much more common as a form of the litra sign. A variant of the sign can be formed from 0338 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY and either 039B GREEK CAPITAL LETTER LAMDA (Λ̸) or 03BB GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA (λ̸).[17]
Unicode uses the (Modern Greek-based) spelling "lamda" in character names, instead of "lambda", due to "the pre-existing names in ISO 8859-7, as well as preferences expressed by the Greek National Body".[18]
These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.