Alpha (Α, α) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the number 1 in Greek numerals, and it traces its roots back to the Phoenician letter aleph (meaning 'ox'), which also spawned the Latin A and Cyrillic А. Linguistically, it was pronounced as a long or short "a" in Ancient Greek, though in the Attic-Ionic dialect, long alpha often shifted to "eta" (η), while Modern Greek simply uses the sound [a]. In science and mathematics, the lowercase alpha is a versatile symbol, denoting alpha particles, angular acceleration, the fine-structure constant, the brightest star in a constellation, and the significance level in statistical hypothesis testing. The Greek alphabet was adopted around the early 8th century BC (possibly in Euboea), where the Phoenician glottal stop was repurposed as the vowel [a]. Symbolically, Alpha signifies the "first" or "primary" element, famously paired with Omega to represent the beginning and the end.