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49 free Greek Alphabet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many letters are in the standard Greek alphabet?
24
The standard Greek alphabet has 24 letters; Athens adopted this set in 403 BC, and it became standard across the Greek world by the end of the 4th century BC.
Q 02What is the last letter of the Greek alphabet?
Omega
Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet; its Byzantine-era name means 'big o', and in ancient Greek it wrote the long o sound.
Q 03From which earlier alphabet was the Greek alphabet derived?
Phoenician
The Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician script, a Semitic writing system spread by Phoenician traders across the Mediterranean; the Greeks kept its letter order and most letter names.
Q 04What is the Greek alphabet's claim to being the first 'true' alphabet?
It wrote vowels as well as consonants
It wrote vowels as well as consonants: the Semitic scripts it borrowed from were abjads with letters only for consonants, so Greek was the first script giving vowels their own full letters.
Q 05Around what date is the Greek alphabet conventionally said to have originated?
800 BC
The Greek alphabet is conventionally dated to about 800 BC; the earliest substantial inscriptions come from roughly 740–730 BC, so the borrowing is placed a few decades earlier.
Q 06What script was used to write Mycenaean Greek before the alphabet, and is unrelated to it?
Linear B
Linear B was a syllabary used for Mycenaean Greek palace records; it vanished with the Mycenaean palaces around 1200 BC, centuries before the alphabet was adopted.
Q 07How many letters did the parent Semitic alphabet have when the Greeks first adopted all of them?
22
The parent Semitic script had 22 letters, and the Greeks took over all of them, keeping their order before adding several new letters of their own at the end.
Q 08What does the name 'epsilon' mean, a qualifier added in Byzantine times?
Plain e
'Plain e' is the meaning of epsilon (e psilon, 'simple e'): Byzantine scribes added the qualifier to distinguish the single letter from the digraph ai, which had come to sound the same.
Q 09Which Greek letter has a special form used only at the end of a word?
Sigma
Sigma has a distinct final form (ς) used only at the end of a word, while the regular form (σ) appears at the beginning or in the middle.
Q 10What was the term for the archaic writing style in which successive lines ran in opposite directions?
Boustrophedon
Boustrophedon literally means 'ox-turning', after the way an ox ploughs a field in alternating directions; letter shapes were mirrored from one line to the next.
Q 11In which direction was Greek originally predominantly written?
Right to left
Right to left was the usual early direction, copied from the Semitic model, though scribes switched freely; left-to-right became the norm only in the classical period.
Q 12The standard Greek alphabet was originally the local alphabet of which region?
Ionia
Ionia, the Greek coast of Asia Minor, used the alphabet that became standard: Athens adopted this Ionic type in 403 BC, and the rest of the Greek world followed over the next century.
Q 13The standard Greek alphabet is sometimes named after which Athenian archon of 403 BC?
Eucleides
Eucleides was the Athenian archon of 403–402 BC, when the city adopted the standard alphabet during the democratic restoration after the Thirty Tyrants; hence the name 'Eucleidean alphabet'.
Q 21How is the letter beta pronounced in Modern Greek?
Like an English v
Like an English v: regular sound changes turned the ancient voiced plosives into fricatives, so beta became a v sound and the letter's name came to be said 'vita'.
Q 22In Modern Greek, the letter combination mu-pi (μπ) 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 (π) denotes the ratio of circumference to diameter, about 3.14159; the Welsh mathematician William Jones introduced the symbol in 1706 and Euler popularised it.
Q 14Whose 19th-century study gave the archaic local alphabets their green, red and blue colour-coding?
Adolf Kirchhoff
Adolf Kirchhoff, a German epigraphist, sorted the archaic alphabets by colour on a map: the 'red' western type became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet, the 'blue' eastern type became standard Greek.
Q 15Which of these obsolete letters was retained as the numeral for 6?
Digamma
Digamma, the letter for the w sound, disappeared from standard Greek but kept its sixth position as the numeral 6; a similar-looking ligature, stigma, later took over that role.
Q 16In the classical Greek alphabetic numeral system, what did the first nine numeral letters represent?
1 to 9
The first nine numeral letters stood for 1 to 9, the next nine for the tens and the last nine for the hundreds, with three obsolete letters filling the gaps to make 27 signs.
Q 17By roughly what century had Byzantine scribes begun using lowercase Greek letters?
The 800s
The 800s saw Byzantine scribes develop the minuscule from earlier cursive handwriting; the oldest dated minuscule manuscript, the Uspensky Gospels, was written in 835, and Renaissance printers later adopted these forms for lowercase type.
Q 18Which 3rd-century BC Alexandrian scholar first developed Greek accent and breathing marks?
Aristophanes of Byzantium
Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of the Library of Alexandria around 200 BC, is credited with devising the accents and breathings as reading aids for the pronunciation of older texts.
Q 19In what year did Greece officially adopt the single-accent 'monotonic' spelling system?
1982
Greece adopted monotonic orthography in 1982, when Parliament made the single stress mark official for modern Greek, retiring the polytonic system of three accents and two breathings from everyday use.
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 is what the rough breathing mark signals before an initial vowel, as in 'Homer' (Homeros); the smooth breathing marks its absence, and the same mark on an initial r gives the rh of 'rhythm'.
Q 24Which Greek letter denotes wavelength in physics?
Lambda
Lambda (λ) is the standard symbol for wavelength in physics; the wavelength of visible light, for example, runs from about 400 to 700 nanometres.
Q 25In which two Atlantic hurricane seasons did meteorologists run out of names and switch to Greek letters?
2005 and 2020
The 2005 and 2020 seasons both exhausted the 21-name list; 2005 used six Greek letters and 2020 used nine, after which the WMO dropped the practice in favour of a supplemental name list.
Q 26In May 2021, which organisation announced it would name coronavirus variants with Greek letters?
The World Health Organization
The World Health Organization announced the Greek-letter scheme on 31 May 2021, so that variants such as B.1.617.2 became 'Delta', avoiding names that stigmatised the countries where they were first detected.
Q 27The tradition of naming US fraternities with Greek letters began with which society, founded in 1776?
Phi Beta Kappa
Phi Beta Kappa was founded at the College of William and Mary on 5 December 1776; its letters abbreviate the Greek motto 'Love of wisdom, the guide of life'.
Q 28After a fraternity uses all single Greek letters for chapters, what is the next usually called?
Alpha Alpha
Alpha Alpha usually follows the last single-letter chapter, and two-letter names continue from there, much as two-digit numbers follow the single digits.
Q 29The Latin alphabet reached Italy from an archaic Greek alphabet via which people?
The Etruscans
The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet from Euboean colonists at Cumae, near Naples, and passed their own version on to the Latins of early Rome, which is why Latin letter forms follow the western Greek type.
Q 30The Cyrillic script, based on Greek uncial capitals, was devised in which medieval state?
The First Bulgarian Empire
The First Bulgarian Empire produced Cyrillic at the Preslav Literary School in the 890s, modelling its capitals on Greek uncials and adding letters for Slavic sounds; it soon displaced the earlier Glagolitic script there.