The Greek language has contributed to the English lexicon in five main ways: vernacular borrowings, transmitted orally through Vulgar Latin directly into Old English, e.g., 'butter' (, from Latin < ), or through French, e.g., 'ochre' (< ὠχρός); learned borrowings from classical Greek texts, often via Latin, e.g., 'physics' (< Latin < ); a few borrowings transmitted through other languages, notably Arabic scientific and philosophical writing, e.g., 'alchemy' (< ); direct borrowings from Modern Greek, e.g., 'ouzo' () or 'doula' (); neologisms (coinages) in post-classical Latin or modern languages using classical Greek roots, e.g., 'telephone' (< + ) or a mixture of Greek and other roots, e.g., 'television' (< Greek + English vision < Latin ); these are often shared among the modern European languages, including Modern Greek.
Of these, the neologisms are by far the most numerous.
Indirect and direct borrowings
Since the living Greek and English languages were not in direct contact until modern times, borrowings were necessarily indirect, coming either through Latin (through texts or through French and other vernaculars), or from Ancient Greek texts, not the living spoken language.Ayers, Donald M. 1986. English Words from Latin and Greek Elements. (2nd ed.). p. 158-159.Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford companion to the English language, 1992, , s.v. 'Greek', p. 453-454
Vernacular borrowings
Romance languages
Latin freely borrowed words from Greek. Many were passed on to Romance languages then English, usually via French. Some have remained close to the Greek original, e.g., lamp (Latin ; Greek ). In others, the phonetic and orthographic forms have changed considerably. For instance, place was borrowed into French from Latin , itself borrowed from , 'broad (street)'. Italian and Spanish are of the same origin and are later borrowings into English.
The word olive comes through the Romance from the Latin , which in turn comes from the archaic Greek elaíwā ().This must have been an early borrowing, since the Latin v reflects a still-pronounced digamma; the earliest attested form of it is the Mycenaean Greek , e-ra3-wo 'elaiwo(n)', attested in Linear B syllabic script. (see C.B. Walker, John Chadwick, Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet, 1990, , p. 161) The Greek word was in turn apparently borrowed from a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean substrate; cf. Greek substrate language. A later Greek word, boútȳron (),Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages () notes that the word has the form of a compound + 'cow-cheese', possibly a calque from Scythian, or possibly an adaptation of a native Scythian word. became Latin and eventually English butter.
A large group of early borrowings, again transmitted first through Latin then through various vernaculars, comes from Christian vocabulary:
chair << (cf. 'cathedra') bishop << epískopos ( 'overseer') priest << presbýteros ( 'elder') In some cases, the orthography of these words was later changed to reflect the Greek—and Latin—spelling: e.g., quire was respelled choir in the 17th century. Sometimes this was done incorrectly: ache is from a Germanic root; the spelling ache reflects Samuel Johnson's incorrect etymology from .Okrent, Arika. October 8, 2014. "5 Words That Are Spelled Weird Because Someone Got the Etymology Wrong." Mental Floss. (Also in OED.)
Other
Exceptionally, church came into Old English as cirice, circe via a West Germanic language. The Greek form was probably kȳriakḗ [oikía] ( 'lord's [house]'). In contrast, the Romance languages generally used the Latin words (French église; Italian chiesa; Spanish iglesia) or (Romanian biserica), both borrowed from Greek.
Learned borrowings
Many more words were borrowed by scholars writing in Medieval and Renaissance Latin. Some words were borrowed in essentially their original meaning, often transmitted through Classical Latin: topic, type, physics, iambic, eta, necromancy, cosmopolite. A few result from scribal errors: encyclopedia < 'the circle of learning' (not a compound in Greek); acne < (erroneous) < 'high point, acme'. Some kept their Latin form, e.g., podium < .
Others were borrowed unchanged as technical terms, but with specific, novel meanings:
telescope < 'far-seeing', refers to an optical instrument for seeing far away rather than a person who can see far into the distance; phlogiston < 'burnt thing', is a supposed fire-making potential rather than something which has been burned, or can be burned; and bacterium < 'stick (diminutive)', is a kind of microorganism rather than a small stick or staff.
Usage in neologisms
But by far the largest Greek contribution to English vocabulary is the huge number of scientific, medical, and technical neologisms that have been coined by compounding Greek roots and affixes to produce novel words which never existed in the Greek language:
utopia (1516; 'not' + 'place')The 14th-century Byzantine monk Neophytos Prodromenos independently coined the word in Greek in his Against the Latins, with the meaning 'absurdity'. zoology (1669; + ) hydrodynamics (1738; + ) photography (1834; + ) entropy (1865; ἐν + τροπή, coined without reference to the Greek words: Ancient ἐντρέπω 'turn, defer', Biblical and Modern (ἐ)ντροπή 'shame') oocyte (1895; + ) helicobacter (1989; + )
So it is really the combining forms of Greek roots and affixes that are borrowed, not the words. Neologisms using these elements are coined in all the European languages, and spread to the others freely—including to Modern Greek, where they are considered to be reborrowings. Traditionally, these coinages were constructed using only Greek morphemes, e.g., metamathematics, but increasingly, Greek, Latin, and other morphemes are combined, sometimes using the Greek interfix -ο-. These hybrid words were formerly considered to be 'barbarisms', such as:
television (- 'distant' + Latin ); automobile (αυτό- 'self' + Latin mobilis); petroleum (πέτρ- + Latin oleum, itself borrowed from Greek) hemoglobin (αἷμ- + Latin globulus) bicycle (Latin bi + κύκλος); linguist(ic) (Latin + + ); metalinguistic ( + Latin + + ); homosexual (ὁμο + Latin sexualis); speedometer (English speed + -ο- + μέτρον); microwave (μικρο- + English wave); bigram (Latin bi- + γράμμα 'letter') is generally used in computer science and computational linguistics for any two adjacent items (tokens, words, characters) while digram, the purely Greek formation, is generally used in academic linguistics specifically for a pair of letters; unigram (Latin uni-) vs. monogram, which has a different meaning.
Some derivations are idiosyncratic, not following the usual Greek compounding patterns even if they are composed entirely of Greek elements, for example:These are all listed as "irregularly formed" in the Oxford English Dictionary. hadron < with the suffix -on, itself abstracted from Greek anion (); henotheism < 'one (root of εἷς) + ‑o‑ + 'god', although is not used as a prefix in Greek; taxonomy < 'order' + -nomy ( 'study of'), inappropriately using an interfix -ο-. where the "more etymological form" is ,Both are used in French; see: Jean-Louis Fisher, Roselyne Rey, "De l'origine et de l'usage des termes taxinomie-taxonomie", Documents pour l'histoire du vocabulaire scientifique, Institut national de la langue française, 1983, 5:97-113 as found in , 'taxiarch', and the neologism taxidermy. Modern Greek uses in its reborrowing.Andriotis et al., Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής = Triantafyllidis Dictionary, s.v. psychedelic < 'psyche' + 'make manifest, reveal'; the regular formation is , according to the ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, or , according to the linguist Nick Nicholas; telegram; the regular formation is ;Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. heuristic, regular formation ; hemoglobin, originally formed as hematoglobulin; chrysalis, regular spelling ; ptomaine, regular formation ; kerosene, hydrant, symbiont.
Many combining forms have specific technical meanings in neologisms, not predictable from the Greek sense (cf. libfix): -cyte or cyto- < 'container', means biological cells, not arbitrary containers. -oma < , a generic morpheme forming deverbal nouns, such as diploma ('a folded thing') and glaucoma ('greyness'), comes to have the very narrow meaning of 'tumor' or 'swelling', on the model of words like carcinoma < . For example, melanoma does not come from 'blackness', but rather from the modern combining forms melano- ('dark' [in biology]) + -oma ('tumor'). -itis < , a generic adjectival suffix; in medicine used to mean a disease characterized by inflammation: appendicitis, conjunctivitis, ..., and now facetiously generalized to mean "feverish excitement".Simeon Potter, Our language, Penguin, 1950, p. 43 -osis < , originally a state, condition, or process; in medicine, used for a disease. petro- < πέτρο- 'rock'; used to mean petroleum, as in petrodollars. syn- < συν- 'with'; refers to synthesis or synthesizers: syngas, Synclavier.
And some borrowings are modified in fairly arbitrary ways: gas (< chaos) is irregular both in formation and in spelling; hecto-, kilo-, myria-, etymologically , , ;Thomas Young as reported in In standard chemical nomenclature, the numerical prefixes are "only loosely based on the corresponding Greek words", e.g. octaconta- is used for 80 instead of the Greek ogdoeconta- '80'. There are also "mixtures of Greek and Latin roots", e.g., nonaconta-, for 90, is a blend of the Latin nona- for 9 and the Greek found in words such as ἐνενήκοντα enenekonta '90'.N. Lozac'h, "Extension of Rules A-1.1 and A-2.5 concerning numerical terms used in organic chemical nomenclature (Recommendations 1986)", Pure and Applied Chemistry 58:12:1693-1696 , under "Discussion", p. 1694-1695 full texte.g.%2C%20nona-%20for%209%2C%20undeca-%20for%2011%2C%20nonaconta-%20for%2090). deep link to WWW version The Greek form is, however, used in the names of polygons in mathematics, though the names of polyhedra are more idiosyncratic.
Many Greek affixes such as anti- and -ic have become productive in English, combining with arbitrary English words: antichoice, Fascistic.
Some words in English have been reanalyzed as a base plus affix, leading to affixes based on Greek words, but which are not affixes in Greek (cf. libfix). Their meaning relates to the full word they were shortened from, not the Greek meaning: -athon or (from the portmanteau word walkathon, from walk + (mar)athon). -ase, used in chemistry for enzymes, is abstracted from diastase, where -ασις is not a morpheme at all in Greek. -on for elementary particles, from electron (which itself is not a Greek word, but a blend of electric and ion): lepton, neutron, phonon, ... -nomics refers specifically to economics: Reaganomics. heli- and -copter from helico-pter 'spiral-wing' Nostalgia was coined by a 17th-century German as a calque of German Heimwehe.
Through other languages
Some Greek words were borrowed through Arabic and then Romance. Many are learned: alchemy (al- + or ) chemist is a back-formation from alchemist elixir (al- + ) alembic (al- + )
Others are popular: bottarga () tajine () carat () talisman () possibly quintal ( < Latin ).
A few words took other routes:Skeat gives more on p. 605-606, but the Oxford English Dictionary does not agree with his etymologies of cobalt, nickel, etc. seine (a kind of fishing net) comes from a West Germanic form *sagīna, from Latin , from . effendi comes from Turkish, borrowed from Medieval Greek (/afˈθendis/, 'lord'). hora (the dance) comes from Romanian and Modern Hebrew, borrowed from 'dance'. marmelade comes via Portuguese marmelada (quince jelly), from Latin melimelum, from μελίμηλον 'variety of apple'.
Vernacular and learned doublets