beta

The second letter of the Greek alphabet (Β, β), preceded by alpha (Α, α) and followed by gamma, (Γ, γ). In modern Greek it represents the voiced labiodental fricative sound of v found in the English words have and vase.

An academic grade better than a gamma and worse than an alpha.

But let me tell you happy extroverts that only Vera Telfer and H. A. C. Evans got even an alpha minus; only T. E. Hendrie got a beta plus […]

Mr Taylor would hardly give a beta minus to one of his history students […]

Average sensitivity of a security's price to overall securities market prices.

An inspection of the results indicate that Property Trusts is the lowest risk industry with a long-run beta of 0.4520 while Gold is the highest risk industry with a long-run beta of 1.5229.

The phase of development after alpha testing and before launch, in which software, while not complete, has been released to potential users for testing.

The company is offering a public beta program to test the software.

Software in such a phase; a preliminary version.

He quickly deduced our goal—ship a quality beta—but he also quickly discerned that we had no idea about the quality of the product because of our pile of untriaged bugs.

We will assume you got the .tgz version—later 2.x series versions such as 2.5.2 or 2.6.0 should be okay, provided they are production releases (not alphas, betas, or release candidates).

Identifying a molecular position in an organic chemical compound.

Designates the second in an order of precedence.

Preliminary; prerelease. Refers to an incomplete version of a product released for initial testing.

Associated with the beta male/female archetype.

To preliminarily release computer software for initial testing prior to final release.

To beta-read a text.

1999, sqira a., in alt.tv.x-files.creative http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.x-files.creative/msg/29d32d27e61755f2?dmode=source My thanks to Heather; who read it and betaed it. Thank you.

2000, Elizabeth Durack, quoted in Angelina I. Karpovich, “The Audience as Editor: The Role of Beta Readers in Online Fan Fiction Communities” (essay), in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (editors), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, McFarland (2006), →ISBN, page 180, Beta’ing is time-consuming, so asking a lot of people to give you a detailed analysis isn’t the most polite thing to do.