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Script used to write the Greek language

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today. The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are:
Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, [[Pi (letter), Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.

In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek and katharevousa, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent , the grave accent , or the circumflex accent ( or ). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word initial vowel must carry either of two so called "breathing marks": the rough breathing , marking an sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing , marking its absence. The letter rho (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliteration rrh. The vowel letters carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, (i. e. ), which became monophthongized during antiquity. Another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis , indicating a hiatus. This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium ( 257 –  185/180 BC), who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, and also introduced a series of signs for textual criticism. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as "monotonic", was adopted for official use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. It uses only a single accent mark, the acute (also known in this context as tonos, i. e. simply "accent"), marking the stressed syllable of polysyllabic words, and occasionally the diaeresis to distinguish diphthongal from digraph readings in pairs of vowel letters, making this monotonic system very similar to the accent mark system used in Spanish. The polytonic system is still conventionally used for writing Ancient Greek, while in some book printing and generally in the usage of conservative writers it can still also be found in use for Modern Greek. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a similar function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι (ó,ti, "whatever") from ότι (óti, "that").

Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages. For some of them, additional letters were introduced.

Coins from the 4th 8th centuries known as mordovkas were used as currency in Eastern Europe by Uralic peoples and were written in Moksha using Greek uncial script. An 8th century Arabic fragment preserves a text in the Greek alphabet, as does a 9th or 10th century psalm translation fragment. An Old Ossetic inscription of the 10th–12th centuries found in Arxyz, the oldest known attestation of an Ossetic language. The Old Nubian language of Makuria (modern Sudan) adds three Coptic letters, two letters derived from Meroitic script, and a digraph of two Greek gammas used for the velar nasal sound. Various South Slavic dialects, similar to the modern Bulgarian and Macedonian languages, have been written in Greek script. The modern South Slavic languages now use modified Cyrillic alphabets.

Turkish spoken by Orthodox Christians (Karamanlides) was often written in Greek script, and called Karamanlidika. Tosk Albanian was often written using the Greek alphabet, starting in about 1500. The printing press at Moschopolis published several Albanian texts in Greek script during the 18th century. It was only in 1908 that the Monastir conference standardized a Latin orthography for both Tosk and Gheg. Greek spelling is still occasionally used for the local Albanian dialects (Arvanitika) in Greece. Gagauz, a Turkic language of the northeast Balkans spoken by Orthodox Christians, was apparently written in Greek characters in the late 19th century. In 1957, it was standardized on Cyrillic, and in 1996, a Gagauz alphabet based on Latin characters was adopted (derived from the Turkish alphabet). Surguch, a Turkic language, was spoken by a small group of Orthodox Christians in northern Greece. It is now written in Latin or Cyrillic characters. Urum or Greek Tatar, spoken by Orthodox Christians, used the Greek alphabet. Judaeo Spanish or Ladino, a Jewish dialect of Spanish, has occasionally been published in Greek characters in Greece. The Italian humanist Giovan Giorgio Trissino tried to add some Greek letters (Ɛ ε, Ꞷ ω) to Italian orthography in 1524.

Greek symbols are used as symbols in mathematics, physics and other sciences. Many symbols have traditional uses, such as lower case epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number, lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, capital sigma (Σ) for summation, and lower case sigma (σ) for standard deviation. For many years the Greek alphabet was used by the World Meteorological Organization for naming North Atlantic hurricanes if a season was so active that it exhausted the regular list of storm names. This happened during the 2005 season (when Alpha through Zeta were used), and the 2020 season (when Alpha through Iota were used), after which the practice was discontinued. In May 2021 the World Health Organization announced that the variants of SARS CoV 2 of the virus would be named using letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigma and simplify communications for non scientific audiences.

Greek letters are used to denote the brighter stars within each of the eighty eight constellations. In most constellations, the brightest star is designated Alpha and the next brightest Beta etc. For example, the brightest star in the constellation of Centaurus is known as Alpha Centauri. For historical reasons, the Greek designations of some constellations begin with a lower ranked letter.

In North America, many college fraternities and sororities are named with combinations of Greek letters, and are hence also known as "Greek letter organizations". This naming tradition was initiated by the foundation of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the College of William and Mary in 1776. The name of this fraternal organization is an acronym for the ancient Greek phrase Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs), which means "Love of wisdom, the guide of life" and serves as the organization's motto. Sometimes early fraternal organizations were known by their Greek letter names because the mottos that these names stood for were secret and revealed only to members of the fraternity. Different chapters within the same fraternity are almost always (with a handful of exceptions) designated using Greek letters as serial numbers. The founding chapter of each respective organization is its A chapter. As an organization expands, it establishes a B chapter, a Γ chapter, and so on and so forth. In an organization that expands to more than 24 chapters, the chapter after Ω chapter is AA chapter, followed by AB chapter, etc. Each of these is still a "chapter Letter", albeit a double digit letter just as 10 through 99 are double digit numbers. The Roman alphabet has a similar extended form with such double digit letters when necessary, but it is used for columns in a table or chart rather than chapters of an organization.

Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in Unicode. The symbol ("curled beta") is a cursive variant form of beta (β). In the French tradition of Ancient Greek typography, β is used word initially, and is used word internally. The letter delta has a form resembling a cursive capital letter D; while not encoded as its own form, this form is included as part of the symbol for the drachma (a Δρ digraph) in the Currency Symbols block, at U+20AF (₯). The letter epsilon can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped ('lunate epsilon', like a semicircle with a stroke) or (similar to a reversed number 3). The symbol ϵ (U+03F5) is designated specifically for the lunate form, used as a technical symbol. The symbol ("script theta") is a cursive form of theta (θ), frequent in handwriting, and used with a specialized meaning as a technical symbol. The symbol ("kappa symbol") is a cursive form of kappa (κ), used as a technical symbol. The symbol ("variant pi") is an archaic script form of pi (π), also used as a technical symbol. The letter rho (ρ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the descending tail either going straight down or curled to the right. The symbol (U+03F1) is designated specifically for the curled form, used as a technical symbol. The letter sigma, in standard orthography, has two variants: ς, used only at the ends of words, and σ, used elsewhere. The form ("lunate sigma", resembling a Latin c) is a medieval stylistic variant that can be used in both environments without the final/non final distinction. The capital letter upsilon (Υ) can occur in different stylistic variants, with the upper strokes either straight like a Latin Y, or slightly curled. The symbol ϒ (U+03D2) is designated specifically for the curled form , used as a technical symbol, e. g. in physics. The letter phi can occur in two equally frequent stylistic variants, either shaped as (a circle with a vertical stroke through it) or as (a curled shape open at the top). The symbol (U+03D5) is designated specifically for the closed form, used as a technical symbol. The letter omega has at least three stylistic variants of its capital form. The standard is the "open omega" (Ω), resembling an open partial circle with the opening downward and the ends curled outward. The two other stylistic variants are seen more often in modern typography, resembling a raised and underscored circle (roughly o̲), where the underscore may or may not be touching the circle on a tangent (in the former case it resembles a superscript omicron similar to that found in the numero sign or masculine ordinal indicator; in the latter, it closely resembles some forms of the Latin letter Q). The open omega is always used in symbolic settings and is encoded in Letterlike Symbols (U+2126) as a separate code point for backward compatibility.

For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in
The two principal ones still used today are ISO/IEC 8859 7 and Unicode. ISO 8859 7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies.

For the range A0–FF (hex), it follows the Unicode range 370–3CF (see below) except that some symbols, like ©, ½, § etc. are used where Unicode has unused locations. Like all ISO 8859 encodings, it is equal to ASCII for 00–7F (hex).

Unicode supports polytonic orthography well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms for epigraphy. With the use of combining characters, Unicode also supports Greek philology and dialectology and various other specialized requirements. Most current text rendering engines do not render diacritics well, so, though alpha with macron and acute can be represented as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well: ᾱ́. There are two main blocks of Greek characters in Unicode. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 to U+03FF). This block is based on ISO 8859 7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek based technical symbols. This block also supports the Coptic alphabet. Formerly, most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF). To write polytonic Greek, one may use combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF).

IBM code pages 437, 860, 861, 862, 863, and 865 contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternative interpretation for ß).