Greek Alphabet Quiz

Each card shows one Greek letter, uppercase and lowercase. You type the letter's name.

The alphabet has 24 letters, from alpha to omega. Most people know five or six from school math and physics — pi, delta, sigma, omega. The quiz is about the other eighteen.

The traps are the lookalikes. Eta looks like a Latin H but is a vowel. Rho looks like a P but sounds like R. Chi looks like an X. The corner badge shows each letter's position in the alphabet, which is the honest way to tell them apart.

How to play

• Every card is visible from the start. Type any letter's name to solve its card.
• Start typing anywhere; the answer bar catches it automatically.
• Common alternative spellings count. "Ksi" solves xi, "omikron" solves omicron, and "ypsilon" solves upsilon.
• Frequent misspellings count too, such as "epsylon" and "lamda".
• The timer starts at your first keystroke and counts up. Give Up ends the run and shows every letter you missed. Progress saves automatically.

What counts in this quiz

• All 24 letters of the modern Greek alphabet, in order from alpha to omega.
• Each card shows the uppercase and the lowercase form of the letter.
• The corner badge shows the letter's position, from 1st to 24th.
• Sigma's card shows the standard lowercase form (σ). The end-of-word form (ς) is the same letter.

What's not included — and why

• Archaic letters are not here. Digamma, koppa and sampi dropped out of the alphabet more than two thousand years ago.
• Latin and Cyrillic letters that look Greek do not count. The answer is always the Greek letter's name.

Good to know

• The word "alphabet" is the first two Greek letters: alpha and beta.
• Greek was the first alphabet with letters for vowels. Its ancestor, the Phoenician script, wrote only consonants.
• Physicists ran out of Latin letters long ago — mu measures friction, lambda names wavelengths, and sigma sums a series.
• "I am the Alpha and the Omega" means the first and the last — the alphabet's own first and last letters.
• Fraternities, hurricanes that exhaust the storm-name list, and COVID variants all borrow the same 24 letters.