What Is Greek Isopsephy?
Isopsephy (from isos, “equal,” and psephos, “pebble”) is the Greek practice of assigning numbers to letters and adding them up to reveal a word’s total value, similar to Hebrew gematria. Greeks counted with pebbles, and the name stuck. Throughout the Hellenistic and Roman worlds it was used for wordplay, divination, and theological debate. A Roman-era graffito from ancient Smyrna, rather romantically, reads: “The one whose number is 1308 loves the one whose number is 1225.”
How Does the Greek Gematria Calculator Work?
Paste a word, name, or phrase into the text box, or click the letters to type. Click Calculate to see the isopsephy value of your input along with the numbers assigned to each letter.
The calculator uses the standard system of 27 letters: the 24 classical Greek letters plus three archaic letters kept for numbering: digamma (Ϝ), koppa (Ϙ), and sampi (Ϡ).
- The first nine letters represent units (1–9).
- The next nine represent tens (10–90).
- The final nine represent hundreds (100–900).
This system was not invented for mystical purposes; it was simply the everyday ancient Greek method of writing numbers.
How to calculate a Greek isopsephy value
- Find the isopsephy value of each letter using the numbering system.
- Add the values to get the total.
What Is the Difference Between Greek Gematria And Hebrew Gematria?
The immediate difference is the alphabet: isopsephy works with Greek, gematria with Hebrew. Both assign values to letters and look for meaning in shared totals, but Hebrew gematria is tied to Torah study and Kabbalistic interpretation, while isopsephy grew out of Pythagorean number philosophy and Hellenistic literary culture.
The two are related: Greek isopsephy is older, the development of Hebrew gematria was probably influenced by the Greek system, and the term “gematria” itself comes from the Greek word geōmetriā, or “geometry”. They are cousins, not copies.
The traditions also intersect. The Hebrew gematria value of “נרון קסר” (Nero Caesar), the Hebrew name of the Roman Emperor Nero, is 666. The same number is represented in Greek isopsephy by “χξϛ”, the sequence attributed to the Number of the Beast.