[MysticCat]

Phi Mu Alpha uses a chapter designation system that I haven't seen used by any other GLO. (And I have no idea how we got started using it.)

Like many (most?) other groups, our first 24 chapters have single-letter designations in Greek-alphabetical order, Alpha through Omega. (We do use Omega.) But then things get odd. The next chapter after Omega was Alpha Beta, then Alpha Gamma, Alpha Delta and so on. Once we got to Alpha Omega, we went to Beta Gamma, Beta Delta, Beta Epsilon.... After Beta Omega came Gamma Delta, Gamma Epsilon, and ... well, you see the pattern. Only letters that come (alphabetically) after the first letter of the chapter designation were used for he second letter.

Using this method, we finally got around to only one "Psi ____" chapter: Psi Omega. We then went back to Beta and chartered Beta Alpha, then Gamma Alpha and Gamma Beta, then Delta Alpha, Delta Beta and Delta Gamma, and so on. The result is that the Beta Alpha chapter is significantly younger than the Beta Gamma chapter.

We never use double letter designations (Beta Beta, Gamma Gamma, Delta Delta, etc.) The one exception is Alpha Alpha, which is the designation for honorary members initiated by the national fraternity.

We do not reuse or recycle chapter names, nor do we change chapter names to indicate that they have been inactive and reactivated. With regard to colonies, if a colony is a reactivation of a charter, the colony would be known by the chapter name (i.e., Alpha colony). If the colony is for a completely new chapter, we use the state name and a Greek letter (i.e., Massachusetts Alpha colony), which would, upon chartering, be named according to the regular system.

As for other fraternities, it is interesting to me that the only two GLO's I have ever seen hyphenate chapter names (e.g., Alpha-Beta) are Kappa Sigma and Pi Kappa Alpha, both of which were founded within a few years of each other at the University of Virginia. I wonder if there is a historical connection/reason that they both hyphenate chapter names.