Word.ws English Dictionary

Pre-Greek

Pre-Greek proper noun: a hypothetical language (or languages) conjectured to have been spoken in prehistoric Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greek speakers, and used to explain the large number of non-Indo-European words found in Ancient Greek.

Proper noun

Pre-Greek

  1. A hypothetical language (or languages) conjectured to have been spoken in prehistoric Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greek speakers, and used to explain the large number of non-Indo-European words found in Ancient Greek.

Adjective (1)

Pre-Greek (not comparable)

  1. Of or relating to such a language or its speakers.
    • Pre-Greek substrate

Adjective (2) capitalized: pre-Greek

pre-Greek (not comparable)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of Pre-Greek.

Origin of Pre-Greek

Calque of German Vorgriechisch. By surface analysis, pre- + Greek.

Questions about Pre-Greek

What does Pre-Greek mean?
Pre-Greek means a hypothetical language (or languages) conjectured to have been spoken in prehistoric Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greek speakers, and used to explain the large number of non-Indo-European words found in Ancient Greek.
What part of speech is Pre-Greek?
Pre-Greek can be a proper noun or an adjective.

Words near Pre-Greek in the dictionary

  1. pre-gaming
  2. pre-ganglionic
  3. pre-genre
  4. pre-genres
  5. pre-graduate
  6. Pre-Greek
  7. pre-hexameral
  8. pre-Hilbert space
  9. pre-Hilbert spaces
  10. pre-historic
  11. pre-histories

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Pre-Greek (page history and authors); pre-Greek (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Sumxr-Pre-Greek.wav.

Cite this entry: “Pre-Greek.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pre-greek. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.