89 Fun Facts About Greek Alphabet

Which letter comes third in the 24-letter Greek alphabet, after alpha and beta?

Gamma. The order stuck in science: Ernest Rutherford had already named alpha and beta rays, so he called the third kind of radiation gamma rays in 1903.

What is the last letter of the Greek alphabet?

Omega means 'big o'. Medieval Greeks added the tag to tell it from the alphabet's other o, the 'little o', once the two letters had come to sound the same.

From which earlier alphabet was the Greek alphabet derived?

Phoenician. The Greeks kept the letter order and even the names, so alpha and beta are simply aleph and bet, the Phoenician words for ox and house.

Why is Greek often called the first 'true' alphabet?

It wrote vowels as well as consonants. The script it was borrowed from spelled only consonants, so the Greeks reassigned some of its letters, such as aleph, which became alpha, to stand for vowels.

The Greek alphabet ended centuries without writing in Greece, a period known as what?

The Dark Ages. In Greece the name covers the centuries after writing died out with the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC, an era that left no written records of its own until the alphabet arrived.

Which script recorded Mycenaean Greek centuries before the Greek alphabet existed?

Linear B. Its clay tablets baffled scholars until 1952, when Michael Ventris, an architect rather than a professional classicist, showed that the script recorded an early form of Greek.

Greeks first gave the name of their triangular letter delta to the mouth of which river?

The Nile. Greeks of Herodotus's day already called its triangular mouth 'the Delta', after the letter, and the name later spread to river mouths of any shape.

Which Greek letter's name literally means 'plain e'?

Epsilon. Later Greek grammarians said e psilon, 'plain e', to tell the single letter from the two-letter spelling alpha-iota, which by then was pronounced exactly the same.

Which Greek letter has a special form used only at the end of a word?

Sigma. Its end-of-word shape, ς, is distinct enough that Greek computer character sets give it a code of its own, separate from the ordinary σ.

Which writing style, named for the way an ox turns while ploughing, ran alternate lines in opposite directions?

Boustrophedon, from the Greek for 'ox' and 'turn'. Greek masons carved this way in the alphabet's early centuries, then gave it up around 500 BC for lines that all ran in one direction.

In which direction was Greek originally predominantly written?

Right to left was the usual early direction, a habit copied from the Semitic model; left to right became the fixed rule only around 500 BC.

In 403 BC Athens swapped its own alphabet for the one used in which region?

Ionia. Its cities on the coast of Asia Minor, Miletus among them, wrote the version Athens made official, and within a century the other Greek states had dropped their local letters too.

The X in 'Xmas' comes from which Greek letter, the first in the Greek word for Christ?

Chi. It opens Christos in Greek, and English scribes were already shortening Christ to X around 1100, so Xmas is no modern invention.

Astronomers label the stars in a constellation with Greek letters, usually in rough order of what?

Brightness. Johann Bayer set up the scheme in his star atlas Uranometria, and where a constellation had more than 24 visible stars he simply carried on with Latin letters.

Which lost Greek letter, shaped like an F, lived on as the numeral for 6?

Digamma, 'double gamma', is named for its shape, one gamma stacked on another. Greek dropped the letter, but it lived on in the Latin alphabet as F.

In ancient Greek numerals the first nine letters stood for 1 to 9, and the next nine for what?

Tens. Nine letters ran from 10 to 90 and nine more covered the hundreds, but that needs 27 signs and the alphabet had 24, so three letters that had fallen out of use were kept on as numbers.

Lowercase Greek letters grew out of a compact handwriting developed by the scribes of which empire?

The Byzantine Empire. Some time after 800 its scribes dropped the stately uncial capitals for a compact hand adapted from everyday cursive, and those shapes became today's lowercase.

The scholar credited with inventing Greek accent marks, around 200 BC, headed which famous ancient library?

The Library of Alexandria. Aristophanes followed Eratosthenes as its head, a post that the poet Callimachus, who catalogued its scrolls, never actually held.

Which Greek letter is the metric prefix symbol for one millionth?

Mu. The prefix is micro, from mikros, the Greek word for small, and the word's first letter was taken as the symbol for one millionth.

What is the 'rough breathing' mark placed on a word-initial vowel in ancient Greek used to indicate?

An h sound. The same mark on an initial r gave it a puff of breath that Latin wrote as rh, which is why English spells rhythm the way it does.

How is the letter beta pronounced in Modern Greek?

Like an English v. The sound softened over the centuries, and Greeks now call the letter itself 'vita'.

In Modern Greek, the letter combination mu-pi is used to write which sound?

The digraph mu-pi writes the sound b in Modern Greek because the ancient plosive letters shifted to fricatives; similarly nu-tau writes d.

Which Greek letter is used in mathematics for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter?

Pi. It is short for the Greek word for periphery: William Jones used the letter that way in a 1706 textbook, and it caught on once Euler adopted it.

Which Greek letter denotes wavelength in physics?

Lambda. For a wave moving at a fixed speed, wavelength shrinks as frequency rises, a trade-off that holds for sound and light alike.

Forecasters fell back on Greek letters in 2005 and 2020 after running out of names for what?

Atlantic hurricanes. Both seasons ran through the regular list of 21 names, and afterwards forecasters swapped the Greek letters for a spare list of ordinary names.

In May 2021, which body announced it would name coronavirus variants with Greek letters?

The World Health Organization. It acted because people were naming variants after the places that first reported them, which it called stigmatising and discriminatory.

The tradition of naming US fraternities with Greek letters began with which society, founded in 1776?

Phi Beta Kappa. Its three letters are the initials of a Greek motto, which the society renders as 'Love of learning is the guide of life'.

Which two Greek letters were skipped when the coronavirus variant Omicron was named in 2021?

Nu and Xi. Officials said Nu was too easily confused with 'new', and they passed over Xi because it is a common surname.

The Latin alphabet reached Italy from an archaic Greek alphabet via which people?

The Etruscans. They learned their letters from Greek colonists in Italy in the eighth century BC, then handed a version on to their Roman neighbours, so the Latin alphabet is Greek at one remove.

Cyrillic, modelled on Greek uncial letters, was first devised in which medieval state?

The First Bulgarian Empire. Scholars at its Preslav Literary School devised the script, and it took Saint Cyril's name even though the alphabet he and his brother had created was the older Glagolitic.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Greek letter theta stands for the first sound of which word?

Thin. Theta marks the voiceless th, which also opens the word 'theta' itself, while the buzzing th of 'this' takes a different symbol.

In conventional Latin renderings of Greek names, the letter kappa is usually replaced by which letter?

The letter c. Classical Latin barely used k, so the Romans wrote Greek names their own way, which is why so many of them reached English spelled with a c.

Which three consonant letters did the Greeks devise themselves and add to their borrowed alphabet?

Phi, chi and psi. The Greeks added them for the sounds ph, kh and ps, though where their shapes came from is still debated.

The Semitic letter waw, which wrote a w sound, became which Greek vowel letter?

Upsilon. The Greeks split waw in two: one copy became this vowel, and the other stayed a consonant for the w sound until Greek stopped using it.

Which Egyptian alphabet is the Greek one with extra letters borrowed from the older Demotic script?

Coptic. It kept a handful of Demotic signs alongside the Greek letters, and its name probably goes back to the Greek word for Egyptian.

Which English word for a countless number comes from the ancient Greek numeral for ten thousand?

Myriad. In Greek numerals M stood for myrioi, ten thousand, a word the Greeks already used loosely for numbers too big to count.

Which Greek letter gave English the word 'jot'?

Iota. 'Jot' is the letter's own name after a trip through Latin, so 'not one jot' and 'not one iota' are the same saying twice.

In Greek words such as angelos, the source of 'angel', a double gamma is pronounced how?

Like ng in finger. A gamma before another g or k sound turns nasal, so the Romans, writing what they heard, spelled the word angelus.

What is the Greek name for the acute accent that marks stress under the modern monotonic system?

Tonos. It is the same word that gave English 'tone': in ancient Greek it meant a stretching, as of a taut string, and then the pitch of a voice.

Which Greek letter do mathematicians use as the symbol for the golden ratio?

Phi. Mark Barr chose the letter in the early 1900s to honour the Greek sculptor Phidias, whose name begins with it.

The 4th-century bishop Wulfila adapted Greek letters into an alphabet so he could translate the Bible into which language?

Gothic. The language is long extinct, and most of what is known of it comes from what survives of Wulfila's Bible.

Which Greek letter is the usual symbol for density in physics?

Rho. It stands for mass per unit volume, the figure that decides whether an object sinks or floats in a fluid.

St Anthony's cross, shaped like a capital T, is also named after which Greek letter?

Tau. The letter matches the Latin T, and medieval writers already treated it as a sign of the Cross, which is how a T-shaped cross came to carry its name.

Bactrian, written in Greek letters for centuries, was spoken in what is now which country?

Afghanistan. Greek stayed the language of government in Bactria for some two centuries after the Macedonian conquest, and when the Kushans switched to the local language they kept the Greek letters to write it.

Karamanlidika, printed in Greek letters by Orthodox Christians of Anatolia, was a form of which language?

Turkish. The Karamanlides spoke Turkish but were Orthodox Christians who wrote it in Greek letters, and the 1923 population exchange sent them to Greece.

Which diacritic, two dots over a vowel, shows that a pair of Greek vowels is pronounced separately?

Diaeresis. English uses the same two dots for the same job, which is why some writers still spell naïve and coöperate with them.

Some of the oldest surviving Greek alphabetic writing is scratched on what kind of objects?

Wine vessels. A line of verse is scratched round the Dipylon jug from Athens and three lines run across Nestor's Cup, both from the eighth century BC, soon after the alphabet arrived.

The Semitic letter ayin, whose name means 'eye', became which Greek vowel letter?

Omicron. Ayin stood for a throat consonant, so the Greeks simply reassigned the sign to the vowel o, and the Latin O that English uses is the same letter.

Which two alphabets share the Greek letter order but not its letterforms?

Armenian and Georgian. Georgian's letter shapes look largely home-made, so its Greek-style order is a key clue to where the script came from.

Which slab, found by a French officer in Egypt in 1799, repeats one decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek letters?

The Rosetta Stone says the same thing three times, so scholars who could already read its Greek section used it to decipher the two Egyptian scripts.

In written Greek, the question mark looks exactly like which punctuation mark used in English?

A semicolon ends every Greek question, and the likeness is so close that computers treat the two marks as one and the same character.

Which dystopian novel grades its citizens into five castes named after Greek letters, from leaders to menial labourers?

Brave New World fixes each caste by sleep-conditioning, so the lowest are glad to be spared the burden of thinking, and each wears its own uniform colour.

The phrase 'it was Greek to me', said of something unintelligible, was popularised by which Shakespeare play?

Julius Caesar gives the line to Casca, but it probably echoes medieval scribes, who noted 'it is Greek, it cannot be read' when they met a passage in Greek.

Besides Greece, which European Union member state uses the Greek alphabet to write an official language?

Cyprus held out against the alphabet for centuries, writing Greek in a syllabary of its own until about the 4th century BC.

Which letter of the English alphabet is called 'Greek i' in French, Spanish and Italian?

Y was borrowed by the Romans purely to spell Greek loanwords, so Latin named it 'i graeca', which lives on as French 'i grec' and Spanish 'i griega'.

The capital form of the last letter of the Greek alphabet is the symbol for which electrical unit?

The ohm was given the symbol in 1867 by William Preece, who picked the letter because its name sounds so much like the unit's.

Which New Testament book has God declare himself the first and the last letter of the Greek alphabet?

Revelation uses the title three times and glosses it as 'the beginning and the end'; the image works because the New Testament was first written in Greek.

Which letter, the second-to-last in the Greek alphabet, do physicists use for the wave function in quantum mechanics?

Psi is also the emblem of psychology, a word that begins with the letter in Greek, and as a numeral it stands for 700.

Soldiers fighting for which Greek city-state carried the letter Λ, standing for Lacedaemon, on their shields?

Sparta was the chief town of the Lacedaemonians, as its people were formally known, and the badge was on their shields by the end of the Peloponnesian War.

Which Roman emperor put a monogram of the first two Greek letters of 'Christ' on his army standard?

Constantine is said to have dreamt of the sign before he beat Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, and the standard that carried it was called the Labarum.

The church monogram IHS is made from the first three Greek capital letters of which name?

Jesus is ΙΗΣΟΥΣ in Greek capitals, and its opening letters became the commonest sacred monogram of the Latin-speaking medieval West.

In mathematics and science, a capital delta written before a quantity stands for what?

A change in it, because delta is the first letter of the Greek word for 'difference'; chemists also use the sign to show that heat is added to a reaction.

Which Greek letter, eighth in the alphabet, is the usual label for an unknown angle in geometry and trigonometry?

Theta has a curly handwritten form, ϑ, alongside the familiar barred circle, and in the old letter-numerals it stood for nine.

Which Greek vowel letter began life as a consonant, which is why its capital looks just like a Latin H?

Eta first stood for the consonant h, and the Romans borrowed it that way; eastern Greeks, whose dialect had lost the sound, reused the spare letter for a long e.

Which New Zealand-born physicist named two kinds of radiation after the first two letters of the Greek alphabet?

Rutherford coined the names in 1899 after testing how far the rays from uranium could pass through layers of aluminium foil.

Which science-fiction franchise splits the Milky Way into four quadrants named after the first four Greek letters?

Star Trek runs its dividing line from the galaxy's centre through Earth's Solar System, and one whole series strands a starship in the distant Delta Quadrant.

Which ancient scholar, who measured the Earth's circumference, was nicknamed 'Beta' for coming second in every field?

Eratosthenes was given the name by scornful critics, a medieval encyclopedia reports, while kinder voices called him 'Pentathlos', the all-rounder.

Which Swiss mathematician introduced the Greek capital Σ as the sign for adding up a series of terms?

Leonhard Euler also gave mathematics the letter e for the base of natural logarithms and i for the imaginary unit.

Which rhythms, picked up by electrodes, are sorted into bands named beta, delta and other Greek letters?

Brain waves were first recorded in a human by the psychiatrist Hans Berger in 1924, and the slow delta band is the mark of deep sleep.

The lowercase Greek letter beta is often confused in print with the Eszett, a letter of which language?

German uses the Eszett for a sharp s, as in Straße; it grew out of a ligature of a long s with a z or a second s, with no Greek ancestry at all.

The Greek letter beta takes its name from a Semitic letter whose name was the everyday word for what?

House is 'bayt' or 'beth' in the Semitic languages, a word that turns up in many place names, and the letter's shape may go back to a drawing of one.

Which Greek letter, thirteenth in the alphabet, has a lowercase form that looks like a Latin v?

Nu has a capital identical to the Latin N it gave rise to, so scientists only ever use the small letter, for instance as the symbol for a wave's frequency.

Which Greek letter, the fourteenth in the alphabet, writes the two-consonant sound ks with a single sign?

Xi is easily muddled with the X-shaped letter, which really sounds like the ch in 'loch'; its own capital is three stacked bars, Ξ.

The early Greek letter koppa, later kept only as the numeral for 90, is the ancestor of which Latin letter?

Q descends from it; the Greeks stopped spelling words with the letter, though Corinth went on stamping it on coins as the city's old initial.

Which legendary founder of Thebes did Herodotus credit with bringing the letters of the alphabet to Greece?

Cadmus arrived, in the myth, while searching for his abducted sister Europa, and Herodotus claimed to have seen 'Cadmean' writing on tripods in a Theban temple.

Which Renaissance humanist gives his name to the reconstructed pronunciation used to teach ancient Greek in the West?

Erasmus set out the scheme in a 1528 dialogue, and it pushed out the living Greek pronunciation that refugee scholars from Constantinople had carried west.

Which astronomer's 1603 star atlas Uranometria first labelled the stars of each constellation with Greek letters?

Johann Bayer was a lawyer by trade, and wherever a constellation used up the Greek alphabet he simply carried on with Latin letters.

Which of the risk measures that options traders call 'the Greeks' is, oddly, missing from the Greek alphabet?

Vega tracks how an option's value shifts as volatility rises or falls; it only sounds Greek, and some academics swap in a genuine letter instead.

Classical Greek was normally written in capitals only, without which feature of modern writing?

Spaces between words were simply left out, a habit known by the Latin name scriptio continua, although the very oldest inscriptions had used dividers.

How is the letter delta, once a plain d sound, pronounced in Modern Greek?

Like th in this, a soft buzzing sound; when Greeks need a real d for a foreign word, they have to spell it with a pair of other letters.

Modern Greeks still write numbers with letters of their alphabet in the same situations where English uses what?

Roman numerals number monarchs and chapters in English, and Greek does the same job with letters followed by a small tick called a keraia.

Ancient mystics prized the name Abraxas because its seven Greek letters, read as numerals, add up to the number of what?

Days in a year, 365, is the total, and the followers of the teacher Basilides took it to mean that Abraxas ruled over as many heavens.

The Greek inscription 'Nipson anomemata me monan opsin', carved on medieval church fonts, is a famous example of what?

A palindrome in its Greek spelling, it reads the same in both directions, means 'wash your sins, not only your face', and adorned Hagia Sophia.

On which everyday items does Greece use only the 14 capital letters that look the same in the Latin alphabet?

Car number plates officially carry Latin letters, but only the ones that double as Greek capitals, so a plate reads the same in both alphabets.

Aldus Manutius, who made printed books in Greek widely available around 1500, ran his press in which Italian city?

Venice was where he co-founded the Aldine Press, whose types copied the humanist handwriting of the day and became the forerunner of italic print.

In the older Athenian number system, the signs for 5, 10 and 100 came from which part of each number's name?

Its first letter did the job, so ten was written with the opening letter of 'deka', the word that also gave English decade and decathlon.

Which school subject takes its name from a Greek phrase meaning 'the art of letters'?

Grammar comes from 'grammatike techne', built on 'gramma', a written letter; the first Greek handbook of it is credited to the scholar Dionysius Thrax.

Which computer scientist named his typesetting program after three Greek capitals that open the Greek word for 'art'?

Donald Knuth's TeX is therefore not meant to be pronounced 'tex': its last letter is Greek and should sound like the ch in 'loch'.

Which branch of scholarship studies ancient Greek letters cut into stone, as opposed to handwriting in ink?

Epigraphy takes its name from the Greek for 'inscription', and it is a main tool of archaeologists wherever a culture left writing behind.