WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Greek
Greek gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it. The longest word you will practise here is απάντηση, and 28 distinct characters appear in all. Greek is typed on the Greek 319 layout.
The ancestor of both Latin and Cyrillic, in continuous use for around three thousand years. It is a straightforward alphabet with two quirks for a typist: sigma has a separate form for the end of a word, and the accent system was simplified in 1982 from three accents and two breathing marks down to a single stress mark. The common layout maps letters to their Latin counterparts by sound.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 28 distinct characters across 53 practice words
- Composition
- one character per keystroke, nothing stacks
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Greek keyboard layout
- Greek 319
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 21 of the 28 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- α21
- τ18
- ν16
- ο14
- ε13
- ρ12
- ι10
- ς9
- ά8
- ό8
The longest practice word in this script is απάντηση in Greek.
The one language written in Greek
- GreekΕλληνικά
Other writing systems
- Gujarati Derived from Devanagari and immediately distinguishable from it by what is missing: the horizontal line along the top of the letters.
- Gurmukhi Standardised in the sixteenth century by Guru Angad and used for Sikh scripture and for Punjabi in India.
- Hangul Designed from scratch in the fifteenth century, and it shows: letters are shaped to reflect how they are pronounced, and they assemble into square syllable blocks as you type.
There is a written guide for this script: Typing Greek: a layout you can half-guess. Most of the Greek keyboard is where an English reader would put it. The six keys that are not, the two lowercase sigmas, and where the accents hide.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.