
Table of the Greek Alphabet
Greek name of letter | Upper Case Symbol | Lower Case Symbol | English equivalent | Pronunciation |
Alpha | Α | α | A | A as in smart |
Beta | Β | β | B | V as in very |
Gamma | Γ | γ | G | Between Y as in yes and G as in go, but … |
Delta | Δ | δ | D | Th as in the |
Aug 14 2022
Greek name of letter | Upper Case Symbol | English equivalent |
---|---|---|
Alpha | Α | A |
Beta | Β | B |
Gamma | Γ | G |
Delta | Δ | D |
How to write the Greek alphabet?
Steps Download Article
- Write down the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet in order. [1] …
- Practice learning four to six letters per day. Say them out loud, in order. …
- Each day, add four to six more letters. Continue to say them, write them, use them for spelling. …
- By the end of four to six days, you will have learned the entire Greek alphabet. …
How many English letters are in the Greek alphabet?
How Many Letters are in the English Alphabet? The number of letters in the English alphabet is 26. … There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. It is one of the oldest scripts in use today. Greece is the official language of Greece and Cyprus.
Is the Greek alphabet easy to learn and pronounce?
Well, yes, but also no. In this article we’ll go over what makes Greek easy to learn and also what makes Greek hard to learn. Overall, though, it’s not as bad as it seems. Let’s first shoo the biggest elephant out the room: the Greek alphabet is pretty easy to learn.
What is the entire Greek alphabet in order?
Greek Alphabet and its Pronunciation. Upper Case Lower Case Full name and pronunciation Α α Alpha (Al-fuh) Β β Beta (BAY-tuh) Γ Gγ a ma (GAM-uh) Δ Delta (DELδ -tuh) Ε Epsilon (Eε P -sil on) Ζ Zeta (ZAYζ -tuh) Η η Eta (AY-tuh) Θ θ Theta (THAY-tuh)

What are the 24 Greek letters in English?
The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω.
Is the Greek alphabet the same as English?
While the English alphabet has 26 letters, the Greek alphabet has 24 letters. Here they are…in alphabetical order, of course! So, if you want to say the Greek alphabet from A to Z, you’ll actually need to say it from alpha to omega!
What is the equivalent of C in the Greek alphabet?
“Gamma” is the same word as “camel”, in Semitic “gimel”. The letter actually does look like a camel’s head. This letter passed into the Latin alphabet in this position in a curved form as our “C”. The Etruscans did not distinguish between the “g” and “k” sounds, so Greek gamma came to have the “k” sound in Latin.
What English letters are missing from Greek alphabet?
1.1. 529, the new COVID-19 variant that was first detected in South Africa, would be named omicron. In doing so, the WHO decided to skip over two letters in the Greek alphabet: nu and xi.
What does omicron mean in Latin?
little OLetters that arose from omicron include Roman O and Cyrillic O. The word literally means “little O” (o mikron) as opposed to “great O” (ō mega).
What’s after omicron in Greek?
PiOmicron is followed by Pi in the Greek alphabet system which is being used by WHO to name Covid-19 variants. When the Omicron variant of Covid-19 first came to light, its etymology created quite a stir on social media.
Why is there no J in Greek alphabet?
There is no J in Greek. Greek has no symbol that represents J nor does it have a sound that is equivalent to our J sound. The letter J was added on to…
What does omicron mean in the Bible?
OMI OMNI OMEGA GREEK FOR (end) CRON CHRON CHRONOS GREEK FOR (Time) OMICRON IS THE ‘END TIME’ VIRUS. GET RIGHT WITH GOD. THE DEVIL IS ABOUT TO MAKE HIS FINAL MOVE.” One user who shared the screenshot on Facebook said: “Delta and Omicron = media control” (here).
What is the Greek letter for F?
Φ φThe Greek AlphabetΑαaΥυuΦφfΧχchΨψps19 more rows
How do you pronounce omicron in Greek?
The letter, which is spelled as όμικρο, is pronounced as “ó-mee-kro” in Greek. But the Cambridge Dictionary offers two different English pronunciations of the letter, suggesting “oh-MY-cron” for British English, and “OH-mi-cron” for American English.
How do I write my name in Greek?
The easiest way is to find a Greek letter that corresponds to the pronunciation of your Greek name. For example, if your name is “Maya,” you can use the letters Μά for “ma,” and για for “ya.” You just need to put them together and write Μάγια for “Maya.” Here are some English names in the Greek alphabet.
What is this Σ?
The symbol Σ (sigma) is generally used to denote a sum of multiple terms. This symbol is generally accompanied by an index that varies to encompass all terms that must be considered in the sum.
How do you spell t in Greek?
Tau /ˈtɔː, ˈtaʊ/ (uppercase Τ, lowercase τ; Greek: ταυ [taf]) is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet.
How do I write my name in Greek alphabet?
The easiest way is to find a Greek letter that corresponds to the pronunciation of your Greek name. For example, if your name is “Maya,” you can use the letters Μά for “ma,” and για for “ya.” You just need to put them together and write Μάγια for “Maya.” Here are some English names in the Greek alphabet.
Is the Greek alphabet still used today?
The Greek alphabet is still used for the Greek language today. The letters of the Greek alphabet are now also used as symbols for concepts in equations of the interrelated fields of mathematics and science—for example, the lowercase alpha (⍺) can be used to represent an angle in mathematics.
Is Greek a hard language to learn?
Greek is a relatively difficult language to master. It’s more difficult for an English speaker than Dutch, French, and German, but it might be easier than Russian and Arabic. The reason for the Greek language’s difficulty is that it’s less closely related to English than other languages.
What is the Greek alphabet?
A Brief History of the Greek Alphabet. The Greek language was adapted from the earlier Phoenician and Semitic alphabet. Initially, the Greek alphabet used all the symbols from the Phoenician alphabet and adapted some to denote vowel sounds. The Greeks added and dropped letters over time and changed their sounds and meaning.
How many letters are in the Greek alphabet?
The 24 Greek Alphabet Letters and What They Mean. The Ancient Greeks are known for their contributions to modern society. The Greeks are often thought of as the founders of philosophy, as well as early pioneers in literature, government, and more. The Greeks were also one of the first to develop a comprehensive, …
Why are Greek letters important?
Greek letters are also used often on college campuses by fraternities and sororities, and the organizations are often referred to collectively as “Greek Life” because they have adopted the alphabet as a naming technique , …
What is the significance of the Greek alphabet?
The Greek alphabet has been a significant part of historical events and major contributions to the arts and humanities. Even Greek mythology is a major part of our collective consciousness, and the alphabet was the beginning of these major achievements.
What language used the same alphabet?
At first, the language used the same alphabet was pronunciations, and therefore dialects, differed by region, being separated into Southern, Western, Eastern, and Classic. The Southern dialect was most similar to the ancient Phoenician. The way the letters were written were adapted over time as well. Originally, there were no uppercase letters.
When were uppercase letters added to the Greek alphabet?
The way the letters were written were adapted over time as well. Originally, there were no uppercase letters. These were added in the late ninth century. They also changed what the letters were called to match the changing pronunciation. In this way, the Greek alphabet is very phonetic, and you can see these phonetic influences in other languages …
What is the Greek letter for circumference?
A common example is the Greek letter Pi, which is a mathematical constant and is used as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius. Pi is commonly shortened to “3.14”. Greek letters are also used in astronomy, to identify stars within a constellation.
What letters are used in Greek?
You can see letters like delta, theta, psi, rho, eta, mu, gamma, omega, and many more in scientific and mathematics equations. Also, some are using to represent constants in Science and Technology. They are also widely used in English phonetics.
What are the three groups of Greek writing?
The classical Greek writing system including alphabets and numbers went through many different versions and hence many different local forms were developed known as “Epichoric”. The epichoric can be classified into three different groups namely green, blue and red. Later these groups emerged to become modern Greek writing systems, Etruscan alphabets, and Latin alphabets respectively.
What is the Greek alphabet used for?
It is used to write the Greek language. The Greek alphabet is also frequently used in science and mathematics to represent various entities. Most letters in the Greek alphabet have equivalent in the English language. The Greek alphabet is thought to be where all important European alphabets came from. The alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenician …
Why was the Greek addition of vowels better?
But the Greek addition of vowels was better for countries where it might be a second language. The Greek change made reading easier for trading with other cultures.
How did the sounds of the Greek language change over time?
Some of the vowel sounds began to sound similar to one another, aspirated voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives, and voiced stops became voiced fricatives. One can get an idea of how older Greek pronunciations sounded, by looking at the Latin and English spellings of Greek loanwords like “philosopher”, “Chimera”, “Cyprus”, and “Thessalonica”.
Which languages do not use consonant roots?
In general, Indo-European languages did not use consonant -based roots (where the word’s central meaning is based on the consonants) like those in Semitic languages such as Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
Who invented the three diacritics?
Later, Aristophanes of Byzantium (c. 257–185 BC), a Greek scholar and grammarian, invented the three diacritics (accent marks): acute, grave, and circumflex, to mark the tone or pitch of Greek words.
How does the Greek alphabet differ from the modern Greek alphabet?
In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near- phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages.
What is the Greek alphabet used for?
Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields.
What are the three accents in Greek?
In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent ( ά ), the grave accent ( ὰ ), or the circumflex accent ( α̃ or α̑ ). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called “breathing marks”: the rough breathing ( ἁ ), marking an /h/ sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing ( ἀ ), marking its absence. The letter rho (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliteration rrh.
How many letters are in the Ionian alphabet?
In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900.
How are Greek names rendered in Latin?
The form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨ κ ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨ αι ⟩ and ⟨ οι ⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ (or ⟨æ,œ⟩) respectively; and ⟨ ει ⟩ and ⟨ ου ⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively. Smooth breathing marks are usually ignored and rough breathing marks are usually rendered as the letter ⟨h⟩. In modern scholarly transliteration of Ancient Greek, ⟨ κ ⟩ will usually be rendered as ⟨k⟩, and the vowel combinations ⟨ αι, οι, ει, ου⟩ as ⟨ai, oi, ei, ou⟩ respectively. The letters ⟨ θ ⟩ and ⟨ φ ⟩ are generally rendered as ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ph⟩; ⟨ χ ⟩ as either ⟨ch⟩ or ⟨kh⟩; and word-initial ⟨ ρ ⟩ as ⟨rh⟩.
What does “ai” mean in Greek?
ΑΙ αι. ai. Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek.
Why are phonetic letters separate from Greek letters?
On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones.
How many dipthongs are there in Greek?
Dipthongs When two vowels combine to make one sound, it is called a dipthong. There are seven dipthongs in Greek: The “eu” combination is probably the hardest to learn for most people.
Who was the first person to write the Greek New Testament?
Erasmian pronunciation. This is the pronunciation used here, and is probably based on the pronunciation used by a Renaissance scholar named Erasmus, who was the main force behind the first printed copies of the Greek New Testament.
What is an iota subscript?
Iota subscripts. A vowel at the end of a word will sometimes have an “iota subscript” underneath it; here is an alpha with an iota subscript: The iota subscript is not pronounced, but it can be helpful for identifying certain grammatical forms that we will learn about later (especially the dative case).
What do accents tell you?
Accents. Accents tell you which syllable is stressed when the word is pronounced. There are three different accents, but by the time of the New Testament, they were all pronounced the same. Here are the three kinds of accents, with a Greek word to illustrate each:

Overview
Letters
In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages.
History
During the Mycenaean period, from around the sixteenth century to the twelfth century BC, Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as Mycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the thirteenth century BC. In the late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The perio…
Derived alphabets
The Greek alphabet was the model for various others:
• The Etruscan alphabet;
• The Latin alphabet, together with various other ancient scripts in Italy, adopted from an archaic form of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Greek colonists in the late 8th century BC, via Etruscan;
Other uses
Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages. For some of them, additional letters were introduced.
• Most of the Iron Age alphabets of Asia Minor were also adopted around the sa…
Glyph variants
Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in Unicode.
• The symbol ϐ (“curled beta”) is a cursive variant form of beta (β). In the French tradition of Ancient Greek typography, β is used word-initially, and ϐ is used word-internally.
Computer encodings
For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in RFC 1947.
The two principal ones still used today are ISO/IEC 8859-7 and Unicode. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies.
For the range A0–FF (hex), it follows the Unicode range 370–3CF (see below) except that some …
See also
• Greek Font Society
• Greek ligatures
• Palamedes
• Romanization of Greek