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Features

A number of features have been implemented to enhance this resource; for example diacritics-insensitive live search (based on Lucene, random ancient Greek quotes with English translations, semantically arranged data (like the Indexes of various transliterations and forms). It was a long and arduous trip, but we hope you will agree with us that it was worth the effort.

Search

You can search using polytonic Greek, monotonic Greek, atonic Greek or Latin characters (lowercase or uppercase). You will get live search results no matter which option you choose.

Transliterations and forms

There are 8 different forms.

• Full diacritics: this is the form of the word with the maximum number of diacritics. The only difference betwen this one and Medium diacritics is that this one may also have macron and vrachy marks. A known issue here in the original Perseus data, is that macron and vrachy are often not combined with the accent mark (when the specific letter should also have an accent).
• Medium diacritics: This is the standard used in Ancient Greek polytonic writing with full accents and breathings, excluding macron and vrachy. In many cases the word in Medium diacritics will be exactly the same as in Full diacritics as not all Full diacritics entries contain macron and vrachy.
• Low diacritics: In this format only the acute accent is used and it is the way a word would be written in monotonic Greek (Modern Greek). In some cases the word in Low diacritics will be exactly the same as in Medium diacritics and Full diacritics when there are no breathings, iota subscript or grave accent in Medium diacritics.
• Capitals: Capitalized Greek letters without any diacritics whatsoever. This is the form used in Ancient Greek times and it is also almost identical to Modern Greek capitalization rules.
• Transliteration A: This is a detailed form of transliteration, taking into account accents and breathings. Transliteration A was based on Medium diacritics.
• Transliteration B: This is a less detailed form of transliteration, without taking into account accents or breathings. Transliteration B was based on Medium diacritics.
• Transliteration C: This is a form typically used in Greeklish. Transliteration C was based on Low diacritics.
• Beta Code: This is a format used by scholars so that they can type easily polytonic Greek on a Latin keyboard. Beta Code was based on Medium diacritics. Usually, Beta Code is represented in all caps (and resulting polytonic capitals are differentiated with an asterisk before the letter) but Perseus uses a lowercase representation which I consider more succinct. More about Beta Code and a Beta Code to Unicode converter and type tool.