Naming the 3s

Nick Shinn

Is there a naming convention to distinguish between these two different styles?

Craig Eliason

Do we need anything beyond the simple "round-top" and "flat-top"?

Cory Maylett

Or these?

George Tulloch

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the flat-topped 3 was sometimes called a "banker's 3". It was supposedly favoured in commerce because it was more difficult to change it by hand to the figure 8.

Ray Larabie

I call the y on the left a "u-ey".  Like the slang for U-turn and it rhymes with screwy.

Stephen Sheehan

Cory, the ‘y’ on the left could be called a ‘schoolbook y,’ along with single story ‘a’  and ‘g’s (schoolbook a, schoolbook g; like a child would write these letters).

Mark Simonson

I think of the y on the left a cursive y.

John Savard

I was going to ask, how about these:

but in the process of preparing the image, I learned that the one on the right is called the "Lunate" epsilon, at least within Unicode.

Which is all very well, but it turns out that the one on the left is apparently the default one, yet in most Greek typefaces I'm familiar with, the one on the right is the normal one used in text, and the one on the right is only used for some specialized purposes in mathematical notation.

Double-checking, though, in the first Greek text I found, the epsilon on the left was used, but then I found a second which used the lunate epsilon as the default:

so it is a stylistic variation between typefaces, even if, for mathematical notation, it is necessary to have two Unicode codepoints available so that the distinction can be made.

And, of course, I therefore believe that the Unicode consortium should reserve another codepoint for the non-lunate epsilon symbol, so that the Greek small letter epsilon may have either form in a font.

Christian Thalmann

I think Ʒ should be pronounced [ʒ].

Okay, okay, I'll see myself out, sheesh...

André G. Isaak

So going with Christian's suggestion, we can refer to the baker's three as 'zhree'. The other one could be called the 'butt-cheeks three'.

John Hudson

And, of course, I therefore believe that the Unicode consortium should reserve another codepoint for the non-lunate epsilon symbol, so that the Greek small letter epsilon may have either form in a font.

Unicode resists providing multiple codepoints for the same character. There are plenty of examples of characters that have free stylistic forms in some contexts and specific required forms in other contexts. Lowercase epsion can have either form in a text font, just not in a math font (that said, Porson is unusual in favouring a lunate epsilon form).