Alpha and omega is a fancy way of saying “the beginning and the ending,” with both religious and secular senses. Most English speakers need help in understanding the origin and the various meanings of the expression.
Alpha was the first letter of the ancient Greek alphabet. The Greeks adapted it from a Semitic source, such as aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Hebrew name for the letter was a variant of eleph (“ox”), and the sign for the letter was a stylized picture of an ox’s head. The Hebrews chose the ox symbol because an extended meaning of eleph was “leader”; the ox, of course, “led” the burden it pulled. Similarly, the first letter of the alphabet “led” the other letters.
Omega was the last (24th) letter of the ancient Greek alphabet. The name was a combination of two elements: o (“o”) and mega (“large”). Literally, then, the letter was “large [long] o” (the 15th letter, omicron, was the “small o”).
The phrase alpha and omega entered English through translations of the Bible, where it occurs several times in the Book of Revelation. The 1382 translation written (or at least inspired) by John Wycliffe rendered the first occurrence like this, with oo as his interpretaion of omega: “I am alpha and oo, the bigynnyng and endyng, seith the Lord God” (Rev. 1:8). In 1526 William Tyndale’s translation gave the first record of the full version of the phrase: “I am Alpha and Omega the fyrst and the laste” (Rev. 1:8).
Most people today know the phrase from its use in the 1611 King James Version of the Bible: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8). The expression is quickly repeated but with the interpretation slightly reworded: “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last” (Rev. 1:11). Later in the Book of Revelation, the phrase occurs two more times.
Therefore, the original purpose of the phrase in English was to name Jesus Christ as the everlasting Divine Being. However, secular uses of the expression have also evolved.
The Oxford English Dictionary records the following secular uses of the phrase to refer to any kind of beginning and ending: “A letter…contained the alpha and the omega of the business” (1800) and “The alpha and omega of science” (1830).
Today people still sometimes use the capitalized form, Alpha and Omega, to denote the Divine Being. The lowercase form, alpha and omega, refers to any beginning and ending, as in “between his alpha and omega, a mere forty years,” or to the principal element of something, as in “fruit is the alpha and omega of her diet.”
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The Bible. King James Version.
The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.
