The First Declension: While Greek verbs are conjugated, the similar process carried out on Greek nouns is called declining. This section deals with Greek's first declension, as it relates to feminine nouns.

Nouns are either masculine, feminine, or neuter. The gender of a noun is constant and never changes, regardless of the content of the phrase containing it. In addition to gender, nouns also have number (just like verbs) and may be singular, plural, or dual (though this latter form is rare in Attic Greek).

Unlike verbs, though, nouns also have case, which change depending on their position and use in a sentence, and serve to indicate how the noun is functioning in the phrase. Descriptions of the five noun cases are outlined in the previous section.

Nouns are declined based on their number and case (and gender, though for the time being we are only looking at feminine nouns). Built on the noun's stem, the first declension feminine endings are as follows:

First Declension Feminine Endings:

It will be noted that there are two sets of endings listed above for singular first-declension, feminine nouns. Originally, all such nouns ended in a long a, and thus used the first set of a-based endings. In the Attic dialect, the a gradually came to be replaced by h, and the second set of h-based endings came into use. Note that the plural endings are the same in both situations.

Additionally, the Attic dialect gave way to a small group of first-declension nouns with endings using a short alpha in the nominative, accusative, and vocative singular endings of some long-a-stem and some h-stem nouns. This subcategory of first-declension feminine nouns are declined with the following endings:

Short-a Subcategory:

Note to users who are using this website alongside their study of Anne Groton's 'From Alpha to Omega': AtoW's 4th lesson also introduces the feminine forms of the definite article ("the"). In this online reference, forms of the definite article in all genders, numbers, and cases have been compiled into a single chart, as they are in the textbook's 8th lesson (p.46). You can find that listing by going to the Definite Articles (8) page on this site.

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