Tell the time like a Greek and impress everybody

Now that you have learned to count in Greek from 1 to 100, it is time to learn how to tell the time in Greek. The very first thing you need to know is that in Greek the word for hour, ora, is female, which means we use the word mia instead of ena for 1, tris instead of tria for 3, and teseris instead of tesera for 4.

These changes apply only when we are counting hours, NOT when we are counting minutes. When counting minutes, we use the words ena, tria, and tesera. A few key words that will be useful to you in telling time are ke which is the Greek word for “and”, misi which is the greek word for half, and tetarto which is the Greek word for quarter. That’s almost everything you need to know to be able to tell time in Greek. You simply say the number of hours, the word ke, and the number of minutes past the hour. Let’s translate some numbers to practice. If we wanted to say 3:17, we would say the number of hours: tris, the word ke, and then the number of minutes past the hour-17- which in Greek is deka-efta. So 3:17 in Greek is tris ke deka-efta.