Introduction to the Greek Articles

One of the most daunting aspects of learning Greek is vocabulary. As I mentioned in discussing some vocabulary resources last post, there are 1,000 words that occur in the New Testament ten or more times. The total word count for the New Testament is 138,162. One thing that might bring a little comfort is that significant portions of these words are articles:

• ὁ - masculine
• ἡ - feminine
• τό – neuter

English has articles (like the definite article “the,” and the indefinite articles “a” and “an”), but these articles are not gender-specific. But similarly to Greek, the Romantic languages include gender-specific articles (like Spanish: “el/los” for masculine/neuter words, and “la/las” for feminine words). If you learn the three main articles above you’ve learned the vocabulary behind 19,870 of 138,162 word uses in the New Testament.