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Greek Alphabet

The letters and characters of Greek written in the Greek script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 12,249,402 people read or write it across 10 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Greek — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page. The Fonts column counts how many fonts include each letter, in the same order as the letters and codepoints; an accented form under a letter gets its own codepoint and count line beneath it.

How the Greek alphabet works

Greek is written from left to right with 24 letters, each with a capital and a small form. Sigma is the one letter with a third shape: ς appears only at the end of a word, where σ is used everywhere else. The accented vowels in the chart above — ά, έ, ή and the rest — are not extra letters. The mark is the tonos, showing which syllable of the word carries the stress, and almost every Greek word of more than one syllable carries one.

The letters that most often mislead English readers are the ones whose sounds have softened since classical times. Β is v, not b. Δ is the th of then, not d. Γ is a soft, breathy g that turns into a y-sound before e and i. Χ is the raspy ch of Scottish loch, not k or h. Φ and Θ do have sounds English uses — f, and the th of thin — but not the ones their shapes suggest to a reader who meets them as “ph” and a hard t.

The vowel letters have merged in the opposite direction: modern Greek has five vowel sounds but writes them with more letters than that. Η, Ι and Υ are all read ee, and so are the pairs ει and οι. Ο and Ω are both plain o, and Ε and the pair αι are both e, while the pair ου is read oo. One result is that you can read almost any written Greek word aloud with confidence — it is spelling a word you have only heard that takes practice.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Greek is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Greek in the Greek script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.