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Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet is Greek alphabet, 37 letters. 24 letters — and eleven letter pairs without which no word can be read. The characters are grouped: twelve letters that read as they look, a familiar look — a different sound, the remaining consonants. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.

Updated September 1, 2026 · Lingofly

Twelve letters that read as they look

These letters read just as they look, and they make up exactly half the alphabet. Reading starts with them: κάνω, μένω, τι, καλά are assembled from these alone.

A familiar look — a different sound

The main difficulty of Greek. The letter is recognized at first glance but sounds different: β is a v, η and υ are ee, ω is an o, χ is a kh. A word read the way it looks, math-class style, a native speaker will not recognize.

The remaining consonants

Six letters with sounds of their own. Two of them are dental — δ and θ, the tongue between the teeth; two more pack two sounds into one sign: ξ is ks, ψ is ps.

The letter pairs

Eleven pairs of letters read as one sound. Nothing can be read without them: Greek has no separate letters for the oo, b, d and g sounds at all — they are written with the pairs ου, μπ, ντ, γκ.

The marks over the vowels

Stress in Greek is not a dictionary hint but an obligatory part of the spelling: a word longer than one syllable without its dash is written with a mistake. The two dots are rarer — needed where two vowels in a row must be read separately.

What to know about the “Greek alphabet” script

There are 24 letters, and their order has been fixed since the 8th century BC — the Latin alphabet grew out of it, and its letters live on in math and science class, so half the signs look familiar at once. There are two cases: upper and lower differ, but a word typed in all capitals usually does without the accent. Sigma is written two ways: σ inside a word and ς at the end — one and the same letter. Until 1982 three different accents and two breathing marks stood over words; today there is a single sign, and the simplification outlived people who remember the rest.

Test yourself

Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.

  1. Which character reads as “a as in "father"”?
  2. Which character reads as “th as in "this"”?
  3. Which character reads as “ee as in "see", written η”?
  4. Which character reads as “k as in "kite"”?
  5. Which character reads as “n as in "no"”?

How to learn letters so they stay

You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.

That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 37 signs in one sitting.

Frequently asked

How many letters in the Greek alphabet?

37 letters — Greek alphabet. The characters have capital and small forms.

Can I listen to how the Greek letters sound?

Yes. 37 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.

How long does it take to learn the Greek alphabet?

A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.

Where to start: letters or words?

With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.

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Work through Greek letters one by oneLearn the letters