Greek Isopsephy Chart

Three tiers of nine

The Greek alphabetic (Milesian) numerals use nine signs for 1–9, nine for 10–90 and nine for 100–900 — twenty-seven in all, which is why the alphabet had to be topped up with three retired letters^{[1] Source: Greek numerals}.

The system emerged in Ionia around the sixth century BCE and displaced the older acrophonic (Attic) numerals during the Hellenistic period. It is the direct model for the Hebrew numeral alphabet and, much later, for Agrippa’s Latin table. Any number under 1,000 can be written with at most three letters, one from each tier.

Stigma, koppa, sampi

Three signs in the chart are numerals only. Digamma (Ϝ, an early /w/) survived as the numeral for 6 and was later written as the stigma ligature ϛ. Koppa (Ϙ, an early /k/) is 90. Sampi (Ϡ, of debated origin) is 900. Because none occurs in ordinary Greek words, they matter for reading numbers in manuscripts rather than for the isopsephy of text — with one trap: the letter pair στ in a word like Χριστός is sigma + tau, 200 + 300, and not stigma, 6. Our calculator counts the pair as 500 and reserves 6 for the actual stigma character.

Sigma and diacritics

• ς, the word-final form, and ϲ, the lunate form found in manuscripts and inscriptions, are both sigma, 200.
• Capitals equal lower-case letters. Ancient texts were written in capitals without spaces.
• Accents, breathings, iota subscript and the diaeresis were added by Alexandrian grammarians and are absent from earlier texts; they have no value.

How Greek writes numbers

Letters are written from largest to smallest and summed, with a mark — the keraia ʹ — after the last letter to show that a number, not a word, is meant: ιβʹ = 12, ρμηʹ = 148, ωπηʹ = 888. Thousands take a keraia at lower left: ͵α = 1,000, ͵αωπηʹ = 1,888. Greek Orthodox liturgical books, chapter numbers in classical editions and dates on some Greek inscriptions still use the system^{[1] Source: Greek numerals}. Seeing a number written this way is a reminder of why isopsephy felt natural to Greek readers: every word already looked like a sum.

Famous isopsephies

Computed live from the calculator: Ἰησοῦς = 888 · Χριστός = 1480 · Νέρων = 1005 · Λατεινος = 666 · Τειταν = 666 · ἀγάπη = 93 · θεός = 284 · ἀλήθεια = 64.

• 888 — Ἰησοῦς. Noted by second-century writers and set against 666 in Christian symbolism.
• 666 — Λατεινος, Τειταν and Ευανθας are the names Irenaeus tried against Revelation 13:18 around 180 CE^{[3] Source: Against Heresies, Book V, chapter 30}.
• 1005 — Νέρων, equal to the Greek phrase for “killed his own mother” in the lampoon Suetonius preserves^{[4] Source: The Lives of the Caesars: Nero, §39}.
• 545 — “I love her whose number is 545”, a graffito from Pompeii^{[2] Source: Isopsephy}.

The Greek calculator has an on-screen keyboard and computes any Greek text; the Bible page goes into the 666/616 evidence.