Greek Alphabet Trivia
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89 free Greek Alphabet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 89 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which letter comes third in the 24-letter Greek alphabet, after alpha and beta?
Gamma
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.
Q 02What is the last letter of the Greek alphabet?
Omega
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.
Q 03From which earlier alphabet was the Greek alphabet derived?
Phoenician
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.
Q 04Why is Greek often called the first 'true' alphabet?
It wrote vowels as well as consonants
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.
Q 05The Greek alphabet ended centuries without writing in Greece, a period known as what?
Dark Ages
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.
Q 06Which script recorded Mycenaean Greek centuries before the Greek alphabet existed?
Linear B
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.
Q 07Greeks first gave the name of their triangular letter delta to the mouth of which river?
The Nile
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.
Q 08Which Greek letter's name literally means 'plain e'?
Epsilon
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.
Q 09Which Greek letter has a special form used only at the end of a word?
Sigma
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.
Q 10Which writing style, named for the way an ox turns while ploughing, ran alternate lines in opposite directions?
Boustrophedon
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.
Q 11In which direction was Greek originally predominantly written?
Right to left
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.
Q 12In 403 BC Athens swapped its own alphabet for the one used in which region?
Ionia
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.
Q 13The X in 'Xmas' comes from which Greek letter, the first in the Greek word for Christ?
Chi
Chi. It opens Christos in Greek, and English scribes were already shortening Christ to X around 1100, so Xmas is no modern invention.
Q 21How is the letter beta pronounced in Modern Greek?
Like an English v
Like an English v. The sound softened over the centuries, and Greeks now call the letter itself 'vita'.
Q 22In Modern Greek, the letter combination mu-pi is used to write which sound?
b
The digraph mu-pi writes the sound b in Modern Greek because the ancient plosive letters shifted to fricatives; similarly nu-tau writes d.
Q 23Which Greek letter is used in mathematics for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter?
Pi
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.
Q 14Astronomers label the stars in a constellation with Greek letters, usually in rough order of what?
Brightness
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.
Q 15Which lost Greek letter, shaped like an F, lived on as the numeral for 6?
Digamma
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.
Q 16In ancient Greek numerals the first nine letters stood for 1 to 9, and the next nine for what?
Tens
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.
Q 17Lowercase Greek letters grew out of a compact handwriting developed by the scribes of which empire?
Byzantine 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.
Q 18The scholar credited with inventing Greek accent marks, around 200 BC, headed which famous ancient library?
The Library of Alexandria
The Library of Alexandria. Aristophanes followed Eratosthenes as its head, a post that the poet Callimachus, who catalogued its scrolls, never actually held.
Q 19Which Greek letter is the metric prefix symbol for one millionth?
Mu
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.
Q 20What is the 'rough breathing' mark placed on a word-initial vowel in ancient Greek used to indicate?
An h sound
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.
Q 24Which Greek letter denotes wavelength in physics?
Lambda
Lambda. For a wave moving at a fixed speed, wavelength shrinks as frequency rises, a trade-off that holds for sound and light alike.
Q 25Forecasters fell back on Greek letters in 2005 and 2020 after running out of names for what?
Atlantic hurricanes
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.
Q 26In May 2021, which body announced it would name coronavirus variants with Greek letters?
The World Health Organization
The World Health Organization. It acted because people were naming variants after the places that first reported them, which it called stigmatising and discriminatory.
Q 27The tradition of naming US fraternities with Greek letters began with which society, founded in 1776?
Phi Beta Kappa
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'.
Q 28Which two Greek letters were skipped when the coronavirus variant Omicron was named in 2021?
Nu and Xi
Nu and Xi. Officials said Nu was too easily confused with 'new', and they passed over Xi because it is a common surname.
Q 29The Latin alphabet reached Italy from an archaic Greek alphabet via which people?
The Etruscans
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.
Q 30Cyrillic, modelled on Greek uncial letters, was first devised in which medieval state?
The First Bulgarian Empire
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.