Beta

How to spell beta

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce beta

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does beta mean?

1. nounA pre-release version of software or a product released to selected users for testing before the full launch.
2. nounThe second letter of the Greek alphabet, written B or the lowercase form.
3. nounA measure of how much a share's price moves relative to the overall market.

Beta in a sentence

• The app is still in beta, so a few features may not work properly.

• In the equation the angle was labelled with the Greek letter beta.

• A stock with a high beta tends to swing more sharply than the wider market.

• The company invited a thousand users to join the closed beta of the new game.

• The fraternity took its name from alpha and beta.

• The analyst calculated the fund's beta to gauge its exposure to market risk.

Where does beta come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes straight from the Greek beta, the name of the second letter of the Greek alphabet, written as the capital B and the lowercase that looks a little like a curled lowercase 'b'. The Greeks did not invent the name from scratch: they borrowed it from the earlier Phoenician letter beth, which literally meant 'house', because the Phoenician alphabet named its letters after everyday objects. The familiar word 'alphabet' itself is simply the first two Greek letter names, alpha and beta, joined together. English adopted beta directly from Greek, keeping the original spelling intact, and over time it gathered new technical uses: a pre-release test stage of software, a measure of a share's volatility in finance, and a label in physics for a type of radiation. Because the Greek root passed into English without French or Latin reshaping, the spelling stays clean and predictable, b-e-t-a, with no silent letters to trip over.

How the word is built

• beta (Greek letter name, from Phoenician beth 'house')