Numbers in Greek: zero to a million, gender, IPA and Greek numerals

How Greek builds 11 to 99

Eleven and twelve are single inherited words, έντεκα and δώδεκα, from Ancient Greek ἕνδεκα and δώδεκα. From thirteen the language simply puts ten in front: δεκατρία, δεκατέσσερα, δεκαπέντε, ten-three, ten-four, ten-five. Wiktionary gives δεκατρία its own Koine pedigree, so the pattern is old.

The tens end in -ντα: τριάντα, σαράντα, πενήντα, εξήντα, εβδομήντα, ογδόντα, ενενήντα. They are worn-down forms of the Ancient Greek -κοντα words; τριάκοντα became τριάντα, and σαράντα lost the first syllable of τεσσαράκοντα altogether, as Wiktionary notes. Είκοσι, twenty, keeps its ancient shape. Compounds line up without and: είκοσι ένα (21), σαράντα δύο (42), ενενήντα εννιά (99).

Above a hundred, εκατό does not change, while the hundreds from two hundred on are adjectives with three genders: διακόσια for neuter nouns, as in διακόσια ευρώ. A thousand is χίλια, and from two thousand Greek counts in the noun χιλιάδα: δύο χιλιάδες, three thousand τρεις χιλιάδες.

Gender: ένας, μία, ένα

One is also the indefinite article and has three genders: ένας for masculine nouns, μία or μια for feminine, ένα for neuter. Wiktionary traces ένας to the Medieval Greek accusative form ἕνα, while μία comes straight from Ancient Greek. Both spellings are current: μία in two syllables, μια in one, as their separate IPA in Wiktionary shows.

Three and four have one form for masculine and feminine and another for neuter: τρεις άντρες, τρεις γυναίκες, but τρία παιδιά; τέσσερις and τέσσερα in the same way. When counting aloud, Greek uses the neuter: ένα, δύο, τρία, τέσσερα. Δύο and the numbers from five to a hundred never change.

The doublets for seven, eight and nine are a matter of register and habit. Wiktionary describes εννέα as probably a learned borrowing and εννιά as the inherited form; επτά and εφτά, οκτώ and οχτώ are both in current use, and the teens follow, δεκαεπτά beside δεκαεφτά.

Greek numerals: letters as numbers

Before the Arabic digits arrived, Greek wrote numbers with letters: α for 1, β for 2, ι for 10, ρ for 100. Wikipedia's article on Greek numerals notes that modern Greece still uses them for ordinal numbers and wherever the West would use Roman numerals, while ordinary cardinal numbers are written with Arabic digits.

A small stroke, the keraia ʹ, follows the letter to show that it is a number: Αʹ is first, Βʹ second. The system needs three letters outside the 24 of the modern alphabet: stigma ϛ for 6, koppa ϟ for 90 and sampi ϡ for 900. CLDR records the system as the traditional numbering of the Greek locale, beside the default Arabic digits.

Decimal comma, zero and a million

Greek writes a comma for the decimal sign and a dot to group thousands: 1.234.567,89. The Unicode CLDR data for Greek defines both, so a Greek price reads 12,50 € and fifteen hundred is written 1.500.

Zero is μηδέν, an ancient word for nothing, the neuter of μηδείς, no one, which Wiktionary says took on the sense of zero from French. Million is εκατομμύριο, literally a hundred myriads, a word coined by the scholar Adamantios Korais in 1805, according to Wiktionary.

Common mistakes with numbers in Greek

A typical error with numbers in Greek is the wrong gender after three or four: τρία γυναίκες instead of τρεις γυναίκες, three women. The neuter forms τρία and τέσσερα belong only with neuter nouns and with counting; masculine and feminine nouns take τρεις and τέσσερις.

The second is spelling. Τέσσερα is written with ε in the second syllable, though the ancient form was τέσσαρα; έξι ends in ι and is not έξη, a homophone that Wiktionary lists separately. Learners also mix the doublets inside one number, writing δεκαεφτά in one line and δεκαεπτά in the next. Either is right; keeping one form throughout a text reads more evenly. Finally, the accent: εκατό and εννιά are stressed on the last syllable, δέκα and είκοσι on the first or second, and the tonos marks the stressed syllable on every one of them.