Interchangeable Greek Words and Phrases in Modern English

"Kyrie, it is Zeus' anathema on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonize the Scylla of numismatic plethora and the Charybdis of economic anemia. It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists." With these words, predominantly of Greek origin, Greek economist Prof. Xenophon Zolotas addressed his non-Greek-speaking audience at the closing session of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on 10/02/59. His speech was a demonstration of the influence of Greek on English vocabulary: an influence so strong and widespread, that, together with Latin, Greek helped change and shape the morphological character of the English vocabulary.

At the time of the Renaissance, Greek and Latin, the Classical languages, enriched the English vocabulary with hundreds of words with which to express the exciting developments of the era. Greek became a major source of specialist terms in the fields of medicine, anatomy, biology, astronomy, science, technology, grammar, literary criticism, and publishing. In some cases, Latin and French acted as "relay" languages for loanwords of Greek origin; in other cases, Greek roots and words were borrowed directly into English. Whichever the route, English would never be the same without words such as photography, phenomenon, telephone, microscope, metaphor, critic, mathematics, hypothesis, pathology, crisis, phobia, lexicon, hierarchy, pentagon, colon, encyclopedia, academy, angel, category, pedagogical, astronaut, logistics, economize, ecology, pediatrician, nausea, patriotism, patriarch, syndrome, empathy, sympathy, dynamic, dogma, theology, nostalgia, didactic, apologize, criterion, zealot, technician, aristocratic, cyclamen, euphemism, zoo, planet, athlete-- to mention but a few examples of words of Greek origin.

The following list is a sampler of (more or less) commonly used Greek words and phrases in modern English.