Beta Code

Beta Code is a system for representing ancient Greek and other non-Latin scripts using the standard ASCII character set. Developed in the 1980s by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) project at the University of California, Irvine, its purpose was to enable the electronic encoding, searching, and transmission of polytonic Greek texts on computers that could not yet display Greek fonts.

In Beta Code, every Greek letter and diacritical mark, such as accents, breathings, and iota subscripts, is represented by a combination of Latin letters and symbols. For example:

λόγος → LO/GOS

ἄνθρωπος → A)/NQRWPOS

This standardized encoding allowed large digital text corpora, including the TLG, the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) Greek Inscriptions, and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, to store and exchange Greek texts in plain-text form before the widespread adoption of Unicode.

Today, most databases have migrated to Unicode, but Beta Code remains important for data preservation, scholarly citation, and compatibility with legacy digital classics projects.