The World Health Organization (WHO) is the organization that is in charge of naming variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They originally named these variants with long, hard-to-say, alphanumeric names. As a result, the public began referring to these variants by the names of the places where they originated, calling them “U.K.,” “South Africa,” “Brazil,” and “India” variants.
The WHO, however, was concerned that this naming practice could lead to stigmatization of people from the countries the variants were being named after, so, in May 2021, they began naming variants of concern or interest after Greek letters in order to make it easier to refer to them while avoiding names that might stigmatize specific groups of people. Thus, they named the variants I just listed the “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” and “delta” variants respectively.
The WHO has continued this practice of naming variants after Greek letters, but, when they named the most recent “variant of concern” the “omicron variant,” after omicron (o), the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, they deliberately skipped the two Greek letters before it: nu (ν) and xi (ξ).
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