Typing Greek via Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is now the standard means of digital representation of Ancient Greek. Your computing platform or operating system should provide a built-in and easy to use keyboard for entering Greek Unicode. Note that it is not always necessary to install and use a polytonic or Ancient Greek Unicode keyboard. As explained below, you should not type in any accents at all unless you want to specify all of them. So for some types of loosely-matching query, which will match regardless of accentuation, a modern Greek Unicode keyboard may be sufficient. On the other hand, you may want to indicate breathings, or you may wish to specify all accents. In that case you will need a Unicode polytonic keyboard. In any case, make sure that you are using a Unicode keyboard (not all Greek keyboards are Unicode).

Unicode input

The main issue to be aware of is that of entering accents and breathings. In general, it is best to start by not typing these, and only add them when you need them for disambiguation. If you type in even one accent in a long phrase, then Diogenes switches to strict accent matching. The only variation that is allowed for in strict mode is between acute and grave at the end of the word. But words often appear without accents, for example when a whole word is capitalized as part of a heading, and so in strict mode your accented pattern would not match these. It is best to start without breathings too, for these also fail to appear in capitalized headings and when the word is the second half of a compound, and so on. If you want to mark the beginning or end of a word, do so with spaces before and/or after the word you type in. Thus "ανθρωποσ" will match πολυάνθρωπος, but " ανθρωποσ" will not.

no accents, loose matching

If you want to search for words regardless of accents and breathings fall, do not use any diacritics. You may use breathing marks (optionally, on initial vowels only) without switching to strict mode for accent. All searches are case-insensitive, so to search for forms of "Heracles", you could search for " ἡρακλ". Note the space at the front of the pattern to indicate a word-boundary.

with accents, strict matching

If you want to specify accents, then use a polytonic Greek Unicode keyboard to type in all accents and breathings. If Diogenes sees a single accent in your query, it switches to strict matching, so it's all or nothing.

Latin Transliteration Schemes

If you cannot manage to enter Unicode Greek text on your computer, Diogenes supports two schemes for typing in Greek words via Latin transliteration: Perseus-style (loose matching) and Beta-style (strict matching).