50 free Greek Alphabet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Greek alphabet trivia quiz covers the 24 letters that have written Greek for nearly three thousand years and that turn up everywhere from maths homework to fraternity houses and hurricane names. The easy questions cover the first and last letters, how many letters there are, the letter that stands for the circle ratio and the script it descends from. From there the quiz moves into the history: the Phoenician letters that became vowels, the local alphabets colour-coded by a 19th-century scholar, the Athenian decree of 403 BC, boustrophedon writing and the three obsolete letters that survived only as numerals. The hard end covers the meanings of omicron, omega, epsilon and upsilon, the two forms of sigma, the scholar in Alexandria who invented the accent marks, the 1982 monotonic reform, the Ionic numeral system, the alphabets that grew out of Greek from Latin to Cyrillic and Coptic, Phi Beta Kappa's motto, Alpha Centauri and the WHO's variant names. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry on the Greek alphabet before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our ancient Greece and languages quizzes are the natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many letters are in the standard Greek alphabet?
24
The set was standardised across the Greek world by the end of the 4th century BC and is still used today.
Q 02What is the last letter of the Greek alphabet?
Omega
Its Byzantine-era name means 'big o'.
Q 03From which earlier alphabet was the Greek alphabet derived?
Phoenician
The Greeks called the borrowed letters by that people's name, then repurposed some consonants to write vowels.
Q 04What is the Greek alphabet's claim to being the first 'true' alphabet?
It wrote vowels as well as consonants
Semitic scripts are abjads, with letters only for consonants.
Q 05Around what date is the Greek alphabet conventionally said to have originated?
800 BC
The oldest substantial inscriptions, such as the Dipylon vase and the cup of Nestor, date from about 740-730 BC.
Q 06What script was used to write Mycenaean Greek before the alphabet, and is unrelated to it?
Linear B
It last appeared in the 13th century BC; the gap before alphabetic writing is called the Greek Dark Ages.
Q 07How many letters did the parent Semitic alphabet have when the Greeks first adopted all of them?
22
Five were reassigned to vowel sounds, and Greek added new consonant letters and a seventh vowel.
Q 08The Semitic letter aleph, meaning 'ox', became which Greek letter?
Alpha
Aleph stood for a glottal stop; the Greeks used it for the vowel a. Bet, meaning 'house', became beta.
Q 09What does the name 'epsilon' mean, a qualifier added in Byzantine times?
Plain e
It distinguished the letter from the digraph ai, which had come to be pronounced the same way.
Q 10Which Greek letter has a special form used only at the end of a word?
Sigma
The medieval 'lunate' form, shaped like a Latin c, can be used in both positions.
Q 11What was the term for the archaic writing style in which successive lines ran in opposite directions?
Boustrophedon
It literally means 'ox-turning', after the way an ox ploughs a field; letter shapes were mirrored line by line.
Q 12In which direction was Greek originally predominantly written?
Right to left
Left-to-right became the norm only in the classical period.
Q 13The standard 24-letter alphabet was originally the local alphabet of which region?
Ionia
Athens formally adopted it in about 403 BC as part of its democratic reforms.
Q 21What is the 'rough breathing' mark placed on a word-initial vowel in ancient Greek used to indicate?
An h sound
The smooth breathing marks its absence, and rho also takes a rough breathing at the start of a word, giving the rh in rhythm.
Q 22How is the letter beta pronounced in Modern Greek?
Like an English v
Regular sound changes turned all the ancient voiced plosives into fricatives; the letter's name is now said 'vita'.
Q 23In Modern Greek, the letter combination mu-pi (μπ) is used to write which sound?
b
Similarly nu-tau stands for d, since the original letters for those sounds have shifted to fricatives.
Q 14The standard Greek alphabet is sometimes named after which archon who proposed it in 403 BC?
Eucleides
The switch was part of the democratic reforms after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants.
Q 15Whose 1867 study gave the archaic local alphabets their green, red and blue colour-coding?
Adolf Kirchhoff
The 'red' western type became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet; the 'blue' eastern type became standard Greek.
Q 16Which of these obsolete letters was retained as the numeral for 6?
Digamma
Koppa stood for 90 and sampi for 900.
Q 17In the classical Ionian numeral system, what did the first nine letters of the alphabet represent?
1 to 9
The next nine stood for the tens and the nine after that for the hundreds; the system is still used to number book chapters.
Q 18By roughly what century had Byzantine scribes begun using lowercase Greek letters?
The 800s
They derived the minuscule from cursive handwriting; Renaissance printers then adopted it for lowercase type.
Q 19Which 3rd-century BC Alexandrian scholar first developed Greek accent and breathing marks?
Aristophanes of Byzantium
He was also the first to divide poems into lines rather than writing them as prose.
Q 20In what year did Greece officially adopt the single-accent 'monotonic' spelling system?
1982
The older polytonic system with three accents and two breathings is still used for Ancient Greek.
Q 24Which Greek letter is used in mathematics for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter?
Pi
Lowercase epsilon traditionally stands for an arbitrarily small positive number.
Q 25In astronomy, the brightest star in a constellation is usually designated with which Greek letter?
Alpha
For historical reasons some constellations start with a lower-ranked letter.
Q 26In which two Atlantic hurricane seasons did meteorologists run out of names and switch to Greek letters?
2005 and 2020
They reached Zeta in the first and Iota in the second, after which the practice was dropped.
Q 27In May 2021, which organisation announced it would name coronavirus variants with Greek letters?
The World Health Organization
The aim was to avoid stigmatising places and to simplify communication for the public.
Q 28The tradition of naming US fraternities with Greek letters began with which society, founded in 1776?
Phi Beta Kappa
It was founded at the College of William and Mary; the letters abbreviate a Greek motto meaning 'Love of wisdom, the guide of life'.
Q 29In a fraternity with more than 24 chapters, what is the chapter after the 24th usually called?
Alpha Alpha
Chapters are numbered with Greek letters in sequence, so double letters follow, like double-digit numbers.
Q 30The Latin alphabet reached Italy from an archaic Greek alphabet via which people?
The Etruscans
Greek colonists brought the letters to Italy in the late 8th century BC.