Ancient Greek Keyboard Online

Who types polytonic Greek

Polytonic spelling is the norm for anything written in Greek before the twentieth century. Students of Classics need it for Homer, Plato and the tragedians, and for composition exercises where a missing breathing counts as an error. Students of the New Testament and the Septuagint use it because every critical edition is printed in it. Orthodox liturgical books, Byzantine chronicles and documents in Katharevousa, the learned register used in Greek law and administration until 1976, all keep the breathings, the three accents and the iota subscript.

A worked example: the first line of the Iliad

Take Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ ("Sing, goddess, the wrath"). Key names below are positions on a US keyboard; on the screen each key shows the Greek character it produces.

• Μῆνιν: Shift+M for Μ, then Shift+` (circumflex) and H to get ῆ, then N, I, N.
• ἄειδε: [ (smooth breathing), ; (acute), A gives ἄ; then E, I, D, E.
• θεὰ: U for θ, E, then ` and A for ὰ. Alone the word is θεά, but a final acute turns grave when another word follows.

For the capital in Ἀχιλῆος, two words later, press [ and then Shift+A: the breathing is placed before the capital, as Greek typography requires. While a diacritic is waiting for its letter, its key stays highlighted on screen; Backspace cancels it. Final sigma is never inserted automatically: type W at the end of a word (λόγος = L ; O G O W). The Copy button puts the text on the clipboard; the Google, YouTube and ChatGPT buttons search for it.

Unicode pitfalls

An accented letter such as ἄ can be stored two ways: as one precomposed character (U+1F04) or as α followed by combining marks (U+0313, U+0301). They look identical but may not match in search or sorting, and some fonts misplace stacked combining marks. This keyboard always outputs the precomposed form (Unicode NFC).

The acute is a special case. Unicode has both ά with tonos (U+03AC) and ά with oxia (U+1F71), but U+1F71 is canonically equivalent to U+03AC and becomes it under NFC normalisation. So the ά you type here is U+03AC, which is correct; if a search in an older corpus fails, the text probably contains un-normalised oxia forms. The same applies to the Greek question mark (U+037E, which normalises to the ordinary semicolon) and the ano teleia (U+0387, which becomes the middle dot ·).

Not every font contains the polytonic block (U+1F00–U+1FFF). Reliable free choices are GFS Didot, Gentium Plus and New Athena Unicode; if you see empty boxes instead of ῷ or ἆ, change the font, not the text.

Installing a polytonic layout on your device

On Windows, add Greek under Settings > Time & language > Language & region, open its language options and add the keyboard called "Greek Polytonic"; switch layouts with Windows+Space. On macOS, open System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input, edit the input sources and add "Greek Polytonic" from the Greek list. Both place the dead keys differently from this page. On Android, Gboard offers a polytonic option among its Greek layouts. On any phone or tablet, you can also tap the on-screen keys of this page in the browser. For everyday modern Greek, the Greek keyboard is simpler.