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About the Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician script around the 8th century BC, and the Greeks' key innovation was to give vowels their own letters, making it the first true alphabet in the modern sense. It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, so many letters will look familiar. Modern Greek uses the same 24 letters as in classical times, in capital and small forms, but with modern pronunciation and, since 1982, a simplified single accent mark (the tonos).

Learning to read Greek takes most English speakers a few days, helped by the letters you already know from maths and science (α, β, π, Σ, Ω). The tricky parts are letters that look Latin but sound different (Η = i, Ρ = r, Υ = i, Χ = kh, Β = v, lowercase ν = n), the fact that five different spellings all sound like 'ee' (η, ι, υ, ει, οι), and common letter pairs such as ου (u), αι (e), μπ (b) and ντ (d). Always note the accent mark: it shows which syllable is stressed.

Learn every letter with sounds and example words on our Greek alphabet page, or convert Greek text back to Latin letters with the Greek to Latin converter.