Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.
One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed number "3" and is encoded U+03B5 ε GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON.
While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols: computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them.
Archaic writing often preserves the Phoenician form with a vertical stem extending slightly below the lowest horizontal bar.
[12] In Thespiai (Boeotia), a special letter form consisting of a vertical stem with a single rightward-pointing horizontal bar () was used for what was probably a raised variant of /e/ in pre-vocalic environments.
After the establishment of the canonical classical Ionian (Euclidean) Greek alphabet, new glyph variants for Ε were introduced through handwriting.
In the uncial script (used for literary papyrus manuscripts in late antiquity and then in early medieval vellum codices), the "lunate" shape () became predominant.
In cursive handwriting, a large number of shorthand glyphs came to be used, where the cross-bar and the curved stroke were linked in various ways.
[15] Some of them resembled a modern lowercase Latin "e", some a "6" with a connecting stroke to the next letter starting from the middle, and some a combination of two small "c"-like curves.
Of the various minuscule letter shapes, the inverted-3 form became the basis for lower-case Epsilon in Greek typography during the modern era.
Despite its pronunciation as mid, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Latin epsilon /ɛ/ represents open-mid front unrounded vowel, as in the English word pet /pɛt/.