Beta ( UK : / ˈ b iː t ə / , US : / ˈ b eɪ t ə / ; uppercase Β , lowercase β , or cursive ϐ ; Ancient Greek : βῆτα , romanized : bē̂ta or Greek : βήτα , romanized : víta ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek , beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive IPA: [b] . In Modern Greek , it represents the voiced labiodental fricative IPA: [v] while IPA: [b] in borrowed words is instead commonly transcribed as μπ. Letters that arose from beta include the Roman letter ⟨ B ⟩ and the Cyrillic letters ⟨ Б ⟩ and ⟨ В ⟩ .
34-594: Like the names of most other Greek letters, the name of beta was adopted from the acrophonic name of the corresponding letter in Phoenician , which was the common Semitic word * bayt ('house', compare Arabic : بيت bayt and Hebrew : בית báyit ). In Greek, the name was βῆτα bêta , pronounced [bɛ̂ːta] in Ancient Greek. It is spelled βήτα in modern monotonic orthography and pronounced [ˈvita] . The letter beta
68-551: A Latin hymn. Alpha and beta male Alpha male and beta male are pseudoscientific terms for men derived from the designations of alpha and beta animals in ethology . They may also be used with other genders, such as women, or additionally use other letters of the Greek alphabet (such as omega ). The popularization of these terms to describe humans has been widely criticized by scientists. Both terms have been frequently used in internet memes . The term beta
102-462: A prestigious man , not a dominant man. In fact, it appears that the prestigious man who is high in both assertiveness and kindness is considered the most attractive to women for both short-term affairs and long-term relationships. Misconceptions about "alpha males" are common within the manosphere , a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, strong opposition to feminism , and misogyny which includes movements such as
136-472: A belief that women marry beta males to exploit them financially, while continuing to have extramarital sex with alpha males. Ging explains these beliefs as an effort by young men in the Western world to cope with their limited economic prospects following the 2007–2008 financial crisis by appealing to gender-essentialist notions of gold-digging women popular in postfeminist culture. A beta orbiter
170-498: A joke and negative term, often being used with incel . However, in late 2024 with the release of the track "Sigma sigma boy", and through its popularization on TikTok , the terms appreciation has been revived. The terms were used almost solely in animal ethology prior to the 1990s, particularly in regard to mating privileges with females, ability to hold territory, and hierarchy in terms of food consumption within their herd or flock. In animal ethology, beta refers to an animal who
204-402: A significantly more important role in establishing men's attractiveness to women than does dominance. Cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman summarizes: Taken together, the research suggests that the ideal man (for a date or romantic partner) is one who is assertive, confident, easygoing, and sensitive, without being aggressive, demanding, dominant, quiet, shy, or submissive. In other words,
238-416: A stream of unbound energetic electrons is commonly referred to as beta radiation or beta rays . Decays producing electrons or their antiparticles are called beta decays . In regression analysis , ⟨B⟩ symbolizes nonstandardized partial slope coefficients, whereas ⟨β⟩ represents standardized (standard deviation-score form) coefficients ; in both cases, the coefficients reflect
272-590: Is a beta male who invests time and effort into mingling with women in the hope of eventually getting into a romantic relationship or having sex with them. The term earned some media attention in 2019 with the murder of Bianca Devins . A man killed the 17-year-old Devins and posted photographs of her body online, one of which bore the caption, "sorry fuckers, you're going to have to find somebody else to orbit." The term beta uprising or incel rebellion has been used largely among incels to refer to revenge by members of their community who have been overlooked by women. It
306-732: Is a dominance hierarchy among humans consisting of "alpha males" and "beta males" is sometimes reported in the mainstream media. The term alpha male is often applied to any dominating man, especially bullies , despite the fact that dominating behaviour is rarely seen as a positive trait for either an ideal date or a romantic partner. Claims about women being "hard-wired" to desire "alpha males" are seen by experts as misogynistic and stereotypical , and are not supported by research. Evolutionary psychologists who study human mating behaviour instead believe that humans use two distinct strategies – dominance and prestige – for climbing social hierarchies, and that prestige plays
340-592: Is a slang term for men derived from the designation for beta animals in ethology, along with its counterpart, alpha male. The term has been used as a pejorative self-identifier among members of manosphere communities, particularly incels , who do not believe they are assertive or traditionally masculine , and feel overlooked by women. It is also used to negatively describe other men who are not assertive, particularly in heterosexual relationships. In statistics, beta may represent type II error , or regression slope. In some high-quality typesetting, especially in
374-612: Is also sometimes used to describe a movement to overthrow what they view as an oppressive, feminist society. A 2018 vehicle-ramming attack in Toronto, Canada , was allegedly perpetrated by a man who had posted on his Facebook page just prior to the attack, "the Incel Rebellion has already begun". Media outlets have used the terms beta uprising and incel rebellion to refer to acts of violence perpetrated by members of manosphere communities, particularly incels. Sigma male
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#1732765852145408-521: Is an internet slang term to describe masculine men . The term gained prominence within Internet culture during the late 2010s and early 2020s, and has inspired numerous memes , graffitis and videos . It is used to denote a male who is equally dominant to an alpha male but exists outside the alpha-beta male hierarchy as a "lone wolf". In the manosphere , it is regarded as the "rarest" kind of male. In 2023, #sigma gained over 46 billion views on
442-460: Is called 'ox', ʾalp , which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is bet (which means 'house' and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound [b] , and from ālep-bēt came the word "alphabet" – another case where the beginning of a thing gives the name to the whole, which was in fact common practice in
476-907: Is good' in Old Church Slavonic . In Irish and Ogham , letters were formerly named after trees , for example A was ailm (' white fir '), B was beith (' birch ') and C was coll (' hazel '). The rune alphabets used by the Germanic peoples were also named acrophonically; for example, the first three letters, which represented the sounds /f, u, θ/, were named fé , ur , þurs in Norse ('wealth', 'slag/rain', 'giant') and feoh , ur , þorn in Old English ('wealth', 'ox', 'thorn'). Both sets of names probably stemmed from Proto-Germanic * fehu , * uruz , * thurisaz . The Thai alphabet
510-532: Is learned acrophonically, each letter being represented pictorially in school-books ( ก ไก่ ko kai 'chicken'; ข ไข่ kho khai 'egg', ค ควาย kho khwai 'buffalo'; ฆ ระฆัง kho rakhang 'bell'; ง งู ngo ngu 'snake', etc.). Rudyard Kipling gives a fictional description of the process in one of his Just So Stories , "How the Alphabet was Made". Modern radiotelephony and aviation uses spelling alphabets (the best-known of which
544-524: Is sometimes used as self-identifier among men who do not embody hegemonic masculinity . It is also sometimes used by manospherians as a pejorative term for men who are or are perceived to be feminist , or who are thought to be acting as " white knights ". Some manosphere groups refer to members of other groups in the manosphere as betas ; for example, members of the MGTOW community sometimes use it to refer to men's rights activists or incels . Members of
578-403: Is subordinate to a higher-ranking members in the social hierarchy , thus having to wait to eat and having fewer or negligible opportunities for copulation . In the 1982 book of Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes , primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal suggested that his observations of a chimpanzee colony could possibly be applied to human interactions. Some commentary on
612-552: Is the NATO Phonetic Alphabet , which begins with Alfa , Bravo , Charlie , Delta ...) in which the letters of the English alphabet are arbitrarily assigned words and names in an acrophonic manner to avoid misunderstanding. Most notes of the solfege scale – namely re , mi , fa , sol , and la – derive their names from the first syllable of the lines of Ut queant laxis ,
646-452: Is used as a pejorative self-identifier among some members of the manosphere , particularly incels , who do not believe they are assertive or traditionally masculine , and feel overlooked by women. It is also used to negatively describe other men who are not deemed to be assertive, particularly with women. In Internet culture, the term sigma male is also frequently used, gaining popularity c. 2021 , but has since turned into
680-492: The men's rights movement , incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups. The term beta is also often used among manosphere communities to refer to men they consider easily taken advantage of or ignored by women. Its usage is inconsistent; media studies scholar Debbie Ging has described the communities' theories about "alpha, beta, omega, and zeta masculinity" as "confused and contradictory". Beta
714-798: The French tradition, a typographic variant of the lowercase letter without a descender is used within a word for ancient Greek : βίβλος is printed βίϐλος . In typesetting technical literature, it is a commonly made mistake to use the German letter ß (a s–z or s–s ligature) as a replacement for β. The two letters resemble each other in some fonts, but they are unrelated. "Beta" can be used to refer to several consumer and professional videotape formats developed by Japan's Sony Corporation . Although similarly named, they are very different in function and obsolescence. These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using
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#1732765852145748-462: The ancient Near East. The Glagolitic and early Cyrillic alphabets , although not consisting of ideograms, also have letters named acrophonically. The letters representing /a, b, v, g, d, e/ are named az , buky , vedi , glagol , dobro , est . Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet: Az buky vedi, glagol’ dobro est’ means 'I know letters, [the] word
782-459: The angle between the orbit plane of a spacecraft or other body and the vector from the sun. β is sometimes used to mean the proton-to-electron mass ratio . The uppercase letter beta is not generally used as a symbol because it tends to be rendered identically to the uppercase Latin B . The term " beta " refers to advice on how to successfully complete a particular climbing route, boulder problem, or crux sequence. Beta male , or simply beta ,
816-556: The book, including in the Chicago Tribune , discussed its parallels to human power hierarchies. In the early 1990s, some media outlets began to use the term alpha to refer to humans, specifically to "manly" men who excelled in business. Journalist Jesse Singal , writing in New York magazine, attributes the popular awareness of the terms to a 1999 Time magazine article, which described an opinion held by Naomi Wolf , who
850-473: The change in the criterion Y per one-unit change in the value of the associated predictor X. β is also used in biology, for instance in β-Carotene , a primary source of provitamin A , or the β cells in pancreatic islets , which produce insulin . β is sometimes used as a placeholder for an ordinal number if α is already used. For example, the two roots of a quadratic equation are typically labelled α and β . In spaceflight, beta angle describes
884-403: The concept of the "manosphere" and the ideas of hustle culture with bizarre and nonsensical actions being considered part of the sigma male mindset or "grindset". On social media, the term is often used to describe idealistic, masculine fictional characters from films and TV shows. Notably, actor Christian Bale 's portrayal of the character Patrick Bateman from the 2000 film American Psycho
918-488: The names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: άλφα ( alpha ), βήτα ( beta ), γάμμα ( gamma ), δέλτα ( delta ). The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet , in which the letter A, representing the sound [ ʔ ] , is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox , and
952-439: The normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style: Acrophony Acrophony ( / ə ˈ k r ɒ f ə n i / ; Ancient Greek : ἄκρος , romanized : akros , lit. 'uppermost' + φωνή phone 'sound') is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic:
986-469: The pickup artist (PUA) communities use it to refer to men who cannot seduce women. Similar terms used by the manosphere communities include nice guy , cuck , simp , and soy boy . In the manosphere , the term alpha fux beta bux presupposes a sexual strategy of hypergamy or "marrying up" among women whereby they prefer and have sex with "alpha" males but settle for less attractive "beta" males for financial reasons. Sometimes it expresses
1020-538: The portfolio's value tends to change by 1.5%. In the International Phonetic Alphabet , Greek minuscule beta denotes a voiced bilabial fricative [β] . A superscript version may also indicate a compressed vowel , like [ɯᵝ] . Beta has twice been used to name an Atlantic Basin tropical cyclone : Beta is often used to denote a variable in mathematics and physics, where it often has specific meanings for certain applications. In physics
1054-406: The social media platform TikTok . The term first appeared in a blog post by American writer Vox Day . Later, California plastic surgeon John T. Alexander published the book The Sigma Male: What Women Really Want. In 2018, the term appeared on YouTube and in 2021 it went viral after a tweet by Lily Simpson. The term sigma male has also taken on an ironic and satirical meaning, often mocking
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1088-405: The system of Greek numerals , beta has a value of 2. Such use is denoted by a number mark: Β′. Beta is used in finance as a measure of investment portfolio risk. Beta in this context is calculated as the covariance of the portfolio's returns with its benchmark's returns, divided by the variance of the benchmark's returns. A beta of 1.5 means that for every 1% change in the value of the benchmark,
1122-470: Was at the time an advisor to then-presidential candidate Al Gore : "Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a 'Beta male' who needs to take on the 'Alpha male' in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog." Singal also credits Neil Strauss's bestselling 2005 book on pickup artistry , titled The Game , for popularizing alpha male as an aspirational ideal. The view that there
1156-485: Was derived from the Phoenician letter beth [REDACTED] . The letter Β had the largest number of highly divergent local forms. Besides the standard form (either rounded or pointed, [REDACTED] ), there were forms as varied as [REDACTED] ( Gortyn ), [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] ( Thera ), [REDACTED] ( Argos ), [REDACTED] ( Melos ), [REDACTED] ( Corinth ), [REDACTED] ( Megara , Byzantium ), and [REDACTED] ( Cyclades ). In
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