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How Greek has contributed to English

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' (butere, from Latin butyrum < βούτυρον), or through French, e. g., 'ochre';
learned borrowings from classical Greek texts, often via Latin, e. g., 'physics' (< Latin physica < τὰ φυσικά);
a few borrowings transmitted through other languages, notably Arabic scientific and philosophical writing, e. g., 'alchemy' (< χημεία);
direct borrowings from Modern Greek, e. g., 'ouzo' (ούζο);
neologisms (coinages) in post classical Latin or modern languages using classical Greek roots, e. g., 'telephone' (< τῆλε + φωνή) or a mixture of Greek and other roots, e. g., 'television' (< Greek τῆλε + English vision < Latin visio); these are often shared among the modern European languages, including Modern Greek. Of these, the neologisms are by far the most numerous.

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.

Exceptionally, church came into Old English as cirice, circe via a West Germanic language. The Greek form was probably kȳriakḗ [oikía] (κυριακή [οἰκία] 'lord's [house]'). In contrast, the Romance languages generally used the Latin words ecclēsia (French église; Italian chiesa; Spanish iglesia) or basilica (Romanian biserica), both borrowed from Greek.

In clusters such as ps , pn , and gn which are not allowed by English phonotactics, the usual English pronunciation drops the first consonant (e. g., psychology) at the start of a word; compare gnostic [nɒstɪk] and agnostic [ægnɒstɪk]; there are a few exceptions: tmesis [t(ə)miːsɪs]. Initial x is pronounced z. Ch is pronounced like k rather than as in "church": e. g., character, chaos. The consecutive vowel letters 'ea' are generally pronounced separately rather than forming a single vowel sound when transcribing a Greek εα, which was not a digraph, but simply a sequence of two vowels with hiatus, as in genealogy or pancreas (cf., however, ocean, ωκεανός); zeal (earlier zele) comes irregularly from the η in ζήλος. Some sound sequences in English are only found in borrowings from Greek, notably initial sequences of two fricatives, as in sphere. The stress on borrowings via Latin which keep their Latin form generally follows the traditional English pronunciation of Latin, which depends on the syllable structure in Latin, not in Greek. For example, in Greek, both ὑπόθεσις (hypothesis) and ἐξήγησις (exegesis) are accented on the antepenult, and indeed the penult has a long vowel in exegesis; but because the penult of Latin exegēsis is heavy by Latin rules, the accent falls on the penult in Latin and therefore in English.

A few dozen English verbs are derived from the corresponding Greek verbs; examples are baptize, blame and blaspheme, stigmatize, ostracize, and cauterize. In addition, the Greek verbal suffix ize is productive in Latin, the Romance languages, and English: words like metabolize, though composed of a Greek root and a Greek suffix, are modern compounds. A few of these also existed in Ancient Greek, such as crystallize, characterize, and democratize, but were probably coined independently in modern languages. This is particularly clear in cases like allegorize and synergize, where the Greek verbs ἀλληγορεῖν and συνεργεῖν do not end in ize at all. Some English verbs with ultimate Greek etymologies, like pause and cycle, were formed as denominal verbs in English, even though there are corresponding Greek verbs, παῦειν/παυσ and κυκλεῖν.

Greek and English share many Indo European cognates. In some cases, the cognates can be confused with borrowings. For example, the English mouse is cognate with Greek μῦς /mys/ and Latin mūs, all from an Indo European word *mūs; none of them is borrowed from another. Similarly, acre is cognate to Latin ager and Greek αγρός, but not a borrowing; the prefix agro is a borrowing from Greek, and the prefix agri a borrowing from Latin.

The contribution of Greek to the English vocabulary can be quantified in two ways, type and token frequencies: type frequency is the proportion of distinct words; token frequency is the proportion of words in actual texts. Since most words of Greek origin are specialized technical and scientific coinages, the type frequency is considerably higher than the token frequency. And the type frequency in a large word list will be larger than that in a small word list. In a typical English dictionary of 80,000 words, which corresponds very roughly to the vocabulary of an educated English speaker, about 5% of the words are borrowed from Greek.

Of the 500 most common words in English, 18 (3.6%) are of Greek origin: place (rank 115), problem (121), school (147), system (180), program (241), idea (252), story (307), base (328), center (335), period (383), history (386), type (390), music (393), political (395), policy (400), paper (426), phone (480), economic (494).