The Beta reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Beta

Beta can stand for:

• Β or β the 2nd letter of the Greek alphabet. See Beta (letter). Beta should not be confused with a similar-looking but unrelated letter in German language orthography, ß, which denotes a long "s" sound.
• The plant genus Beta, the beets, in the family Chenopodiaceae (or, in more recent classifications, Amaranthaceae).

Deriving from the Greek letter, Beta can have any of the following meanings:

• The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for the voiced bilabial fricative
• In software development, a "beta version" of a product is one that is still in development but is published for testing purpose. See development stage.
• BETA is an object-oriented programming language.
• The Beta programming language was used with the early cryptanalytic computer Harvest.
• In video tape technology, Beta is an abbreviation for Betamax.
• In Rock climbing, a slang term for information about the movements needed to do a specific climb. As in "I'm having trouble getting up this route - could you give me some beta?"
• In investment, Beta is a measure of volatility or level of risk against a benchmark, which can be the market or industry as a whole. It is calculated over a period of months. A value greater than one indicates that the object tends to change at a greater magnitude, whatever the direction.

The American pronunciation is "bA-ta" with a long "A" whereas the British pronunciation is "bE-ta" with a long "E" [1]. See: American and British English differences

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