Greek letters will no longer be used to name tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, the World Meteorological Association (WMO) announced today.

But what happens if a Greek letter requires retirement? It’s not an outlandish scenario given that we’re about to run out of names and it’s only the third week of September.

The Greek letters Eta and Iota from the 2020 season will be retired as well, which is significant since before this year, the WMO made it very clear that it would not ever retire Greek names.

We’ll call that a high covariance. No Greek letter here, although a variant concept—correlation—has been assigned by the pros the letter ρ (rho).

The Cyrillic alphabet, the script of Russians (and others), is one of the most widely used systems of writing in the world.

Just as the English alphabet groups the three crazy letters—“X,” “Y,” and “Z”—at the end, Greek saves some very special characters for last.

The Greek-letter labelling proposed by the WHO is therefore an official attempt to provide the convenience of simple, uncontroversial monikers. Greek letters are often used as parts of scientific ...

The new system, which was announced Monday, is based on the letters of the Greek alphabet. The United Kingdom variant, called by scientists B.1.1.7, will now be Alpha.

But the health agency skipped Nu, along with the letter after that – Xi – and instead went straight to Omicron – the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet has 24 letters.