15 English words that actually come from Greek

Did you know that about 5% of English words actually come from Greek? Some of them are everyday words like "lion," "pause," or "Europe," but Greek is also the source of lots of technical vocabulary. Greek, in particular, is where we get a lot of the words we use to talk about science, medicine, and philosophy.

Fun fact: Most Greek words we use in English didn't come to us straight from Greek. A lot of them took the long way around, we took them from French, French took them from Latin, and it was the Romans that took them from Greek. Other words were created in English by sticking together pieces of Greek words. This means that lots of the Greek words we use in English have very interesting histories.

In this post, we'll introduce you to some particularly interesting English words (or pieces of words) that come from Greek, talk a little about their histories, and give you some tips for how to use them in English. We'll look first at 10 more obviously Greek words, then we'll have a look at 5 bonus words that might surprise you. Ready to have a look?

The English word "echo" comes from the name of an Ancient Greek mythological figure named ἠχώ[e-HOH].

Echo was a mountain nymph (a sort of nature spirit) who once had a lovely voice that she used to hide the fact that Zeus was being unfaithful. This angered Zeus's wife, the goddess Hera, so she cursed Echo so that she could only repeat the words of others.

Some time after this curse had been cast, Echo famously fell in love with a hunter, Narcissus, who was said to be one of the most handsome men to ever live. But Narcissus rejected her, since all she could do was repeat his words back to him. This broke Echo's heart, so she ran away to hide and waste away in mountain caves until all had faded from her except her voice. There, she can still be heard, repeating back the words of others.

Echo by Talbot Hughes, 1900

The word "cynical" and its related words "cynic" and "cynicism" also have their origins in Greek, but their story is a little more interesting than you might guess.

Our modern use of the word "cynical" to describe "someone who always thinks people are just motivated by self-interest" actually comes from the name of an Ancient Greek school of philosophy: "Cynicism." Where things start to get interesting, though, is in the literal meaning of this term in Greek.

The Ancient Greek word that was used to refer to people who followed this Cynical philosophy was κυνικός[kunikos]which literally means "dog-like" It's related to the Greek word κύων[kuon], meaning "hound".

Why did the Ancient Greeks call Cynical philosophers "doggy people?" There are a few different stories out there. One story is that it has to do with the simple and yet confrontational way that Cynics lived (i.e. they lived like dogs). However, it's more likely that this has to do with the name of the gymnasium where the earliest Cynics taught and spent their time, which was called,Κυνόσαργες[kynosarges] or "The Shining Dog." According to this second story, the Greeks called Cynics "stray dogs" as a kind of a joke.

Unfortunately, we may never know for sure, but either way, it's a great story!

Diogenes Sitting in His Tub by Jean-Léon Gérôme
(Diogenes was a famous Ancient Greek Cynic)

Even though bacteria weren't discovered until the 1600s, their name comes from Ancient Greek. How can this be true?

Well, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed bacteria through a microscope, he thought they looked like "little sticks," and so he named using the plural form of the Latin word bacterium, meaning "small staff." But this Latin word had been taken from the Ancient Greek word: βακτήριον[baKTEEreeon], meaning "small stick, rod, or cudgel."

So, literally, "bacteria" are "little rods".

A lot of our names for things in science ultimately come from Greek. Why is that? Well, just like in English, we take our scientific terminology from Latin, in Ancient Rome, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers took their technical vocab from Greek! So when we take a fancy Latin term, that term was fancy first in Greek.

Believe it or not, our word "hippopotamus" literally means "river horse" in Greek. It's composed of two different pieces:

• ἵππος[hippos] → "horse"

• ποταμός[potamos]→ "river"

The pieces of this word can also be found in other English words. We use "hippo" in "hippogriff" (half horse, half griffon), and "potamos" in "Mesopotamia" (literally, a land between rivers).

Fun fact: Before we started using the word "hippopotamus" in English, we had two different earlier names for this creature, which both also came from Greek!

• In Middle English (the language of Chaucer) we called it an ypotame, which was a Frenchified version of "hippopotamus."

• In Old English (the language of Beowulf), it was called a sæhengest, which was a direct translation of "river horse" into English words: sæ (sea, pronounced with the vowel in "apple") + hengest (horse).

Did you know that, historically, an "economist" would have been "someone who manages a house?" How's that? Well, let's look at the Greek. The Ancient Greek word that is the ultimate source of our modern world "economy" was made of two different parts:

• οἶκος[oikos]→ "household"

• νόμος[nomos] → "authority," (though the word comes from a word meaning both "to govern" and "to distribute," so you might think of this as "the boss who pays people")

So the full word, οἰκονόμος[oikonomos], was a word for a household manager or steward.

The Latin word oeconomiawhich eventually made its way into English, referred not to the person who managed a household, but to the practice of managing a household. It meant something more like "stewardship."

In English, we got a little more creative with it. Rather than only using "economy" to refer to the resources of a household, we started using the phrase "political economy," to talk about the stewardship of a nation's wealth, and over time, this was reduced to the point that we now just refer to a nations wealth as its "economy!"

And now, an "economist" is someone who studies how people manage the wealth of nations.

The silent "p" is always a good sign that a word came to English from Greek, and the word "psychology" is no exception! This word was created by combining two Ancient Greek words:

• ψυχή[psukhe]→ "soul"

• -λογία[logia] → "knowledge (of)"

So the meaning of this word, in Greek, would have been "the study of the soul."

What makes the word "psychology" interesting, is that even though the two pieces that were used to create this word both come from Ancient Greek, the Ancient Greeks themselves never actually used the whole word "psychology"!

Many very modern English words, like "telephone," "bicycle," "airplane," "automobile," or "bureaucracy" were put together using Greek "pieces." Sometimes all the pieces are Greek, other times one piece is Greek and the other piece comes from some other language.

We're all about languages here at Mango, so of course we're going to include the word "grammar" in our list of English words that come from Greek.

This is a word that came to us the long way around, through French and Latin, but originates with the Greek phraseγραμματική τέχνη[gramatike tekhne]which meant "the art of literacy" or, less literally, "the art of language."

The Romans borrowed the phrase and shortened it to grammaticaand they were the ones who began to use the word in its more modern meaning of "rules of a language."

For a long time, the word "grammar" in English, was used only to refer to Latin grammar and "a grammar" was another way to talk about a book for teaching Latin. The word has only more recently developed into a more general term in English, so that now we can refer to "English grammar," or "French grammar" as well.

The English word "character" also comes to us from Ancient Greek. The development of the many meanings of this word, though, are what really make it interesting.

In Ancient Greek, the word χαρακτήρ[kharakter] was used to refer to a mark made on something using an engraving tool. It's related to a verb meaning "to scrape."

The literal meaning from Ancient Greek, "etched mark" is actually still found in English in the use of the word "character" to refer to a letter or symbol. You might hear this use when making a new password (e.g. 12 characters) or when we talk about "Chinese characters."

But how did a word meaning "letter" or "mark" come to mean "person in a story?"

Even in ancient times, the word "character" was sometimes used poetically, to talk about a mark made on one's soul or spirit. In this sense a "character" would be more like what we think of as a "character trait," something that marks a person inseparably.

This use of "character" is closer to the use of the word caractère in French, which is used to refer to the whole of someone's personality, or the variety of things that mark them. We even use "character" this way in English sometimes, in phrases like "the content of someone's character."

It's a little easier to see how a word meaning "personality" might eventually evolve into "fictional person," right? This last step is actually unique to English, as the French term for a "person in a story" is instead personnage.

"Butter" is Greek? But I thought the Mediterranean was the land of olive oil. Yes, the modern word "butter" does indeed come from Ancient Greek, even though butter was not eaten in Ancient Greece! How's that?

Well, even though the Greeks weren't eating butter in ancient times, it was eaten in other parts of the world, and it was described by Ancient Greek historians. The Greek word βούτυρον[butiron]was most famously used by Herodotus, when he was describing the diet of the Scythians (a group of Central Asian people who did, in fact, eat butter).

Herodotus's word for "butter" was probably made from two different Greek words:

• βοῦς[bus] → "bull, cow"

• τυρὸς[tyros] → "cheese"

Interestingly enough, though, the word "butter" has been part of English since before English even existed. The Germanic tribes who eventually became the Angles and the Saxons borrowed it from Latin before they ever arrived in England!

The word "giant" feels very English, and it's definitely an everyday word, but it actually does come from Greek.

"Giant" comes from the Greek word γίγας[gigas] which was used to refer to a type of ancient being that existed before the birth of the gods or even the titans. These creatures were the children of Gaia (the earth) and Uranus (the sky). Unlike more modern giants, the Ancient Greek giants were not always depicted as being incredibly large, however they were always very strong. Though the Ancient Greek gods eventually defeated the giants, they were then buried under mountains and were thought to be the source of the power of volcanoes.

A depiction of an Ancient Greek giant (right) being defeated by the god Poseidon (left)

Because, giants were seen as being so strong and powerful, they have, today, come to be associated with large size, so anything that is "giant-like" is something of large size or scale.

It might seem surprising that a word for something that's all around us would come from another language, but believe it or not, the word "air" actually comes straight from Ancient Greek.

In Ancient Greek, this word was also used to talk about mist and wind, and, interestingly enough, it shares a root with the word αὔρα[aura]which meant "breeze" or "breath." This second Greek word is the source of the English word "aura." So "air" and "aura" share an origin!

In some sense, the word "hour" is a technical word, so it's maybe not so surprising that it comes from Greek. Still, the story of this word is pretty cool.

The English word "hour" comes from the Greek word ὥρα[hora]. While the descendants of this word in Latin and French all have more-or-less the same meaning as the English word "hour," in Ancient Greek this term was much broader.

In Ancient Greece, an ὥρα[hora] could really be any period of time within the span of a year. So it could mean a year, a month, a season, an hour, or a day. The Greek word actually shares a common origin with the English word "year"! They both come from an even more ancient Proto-Indo-European word, *yeh-. So "year" and "hour" were, a very very long time ago, the same word.

The word "hour" was only narrowed to refer to fixed or regular periods of time within a single day when it started to be used to talk about "canonical hours" within the Christian church (times when certain prayers ought to be said).

Our last word is a very simple one, "place." Like "character," is a word with a lot of different meanings, but all of them come from Greek.

The word "place" comes from the Ancient Greek phrase πλατεῖα ὁδός[plateia hodos] meaning "broad way" or "broad street." This was often shortened just to πλατεῖα[plateia].

The original meaning of the word "place" to mean open square or wide avenue does survive into modern English. If you've ever been to Traverse City, you'll probably remember the Park Place Hotel, or if you've read Harry Potter, think of Grimmauld Place. But, in English, the meaning of the word "place" has really broadened lot more. We more often use it to mean "location" or even as a verb, "to put in a location."

What's interesting, though, is that English has actually re-adopted the descendants of πλατεῖα[plateia] in other European languages as separate English words. For example: plaza, from Spanish, or piazza, from Italian.