O-oh! Omicron... how DO you say it?

THE Omicron variant has caused divide – over how it should be pronounced.

The BBC has come under fire from historians such as Professor Mary Beard over its newsreaders’ ‘odd’ stressing of the first syllable.

For Professor Beard, there is a gap between ‘o’ and ‘micron’, with a ‘stress on the mic’.

To old school classicists, the emphasis must be on the second syllable – so they insist the variant is pronounced ‘oh-MY-cron’ instead of ‘OMmee-cron’. Academics have weighed in to acknowledge that the classic way is correct.

Richard Catling, assistant editor of the Lexicon Of Greek Personal Names, explained: ‘The emphasis should be on the first syllable and the O is short (as in ‘object’) not long (as in ‘over’).

‘Omicron in Greek literally means ‘little o’ as opposed to omega ‘large O’, pronounced as a long vowel.’ One newspaper reader wrote in to the Daily Telegraph to suggest that ‘clearly’ no one at BBC News had studied Greek.

In response Jess Brammar, editor of the BBC’s news channels conceded: ‘Guilty as charged, I did not do Greek at school.’