Ksi (Ѯ, ѯ) is a letter of the

early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...

, derived from the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

letter Xi (Ξ, ξ). It was mainly used in Greek loanwords, especially words relating to the

Church Church may refer to: Religion * Church (building), a building for Christian religious activities * Church (congregation), a local congregation of a Christian denomination * Church service, a formalized period of Christian communal worship * C ...

. Ksi was eliminated from the Russian alphabet along with psi,

omega Omega (; capital: Ω, lowercase: ω; Ancient Greek ὦ, later ὦ μέγα, Modern Greek ωμέγα) is the twenty-fourth and final letter in the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system/ isopsephy ( gematria), it has a value of 800. The ...

, and yus in the

Civil Script The Russian orthography has been reformed officially and unofficially by changing the Russian alphabet over the course of the history of the Russian language. Several important reforms happened in the 18th–20th centuries. Early changes ...

of 1708 ( Peter the Great's ''Grazhdanka''), and has also been dropped from other secular languages. It was briefly restored in 1710 and ultimately removed in 1735. While it was no longer used in typographic fonts, it continued to be used by the church, and since clergy actively participated in civil censuses, Ksi can be found in multiple handwritten civil texts all the way until the early 1800s.

In the

during Peter the Great's time, ksi was also written similarly to an

izhitsa Izhitsa or Izhica (Ѵ, ѵ; italics: ; OCS: Ѷжица, Russian: Ижица, Ukrainian: Іжиця) is a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet and several later alphabets, usually the last in the row. It originates from the Greek letter upsilo ...

with a tail. It represented "60" if used as a number.

Computing codes

Related letters and other similar characters

*X x : Latin letter X *Х х : Cyrillic letter Kha *Ξ ξ : Greek letter Ksi

References

{{cyrillic-alphabet-stub Cyrillic letters