Ancient Greece Word Search PDF With Thinkers, City-States and Games

Pick the city-states, the wars, the thinkers, the arts and Games or the gods, then save a two-page PDF.

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Ancient Greece Word Search

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0 of 16 words found

PNOFPHILOSOPHER

CRSFZMNRCACLGME

HWPYWAMKMLMALAU

YFABRRLDYELWPTD

IAREEAIETXPPLHA

OLTOATDLHAESAEO

HPARTHENONTFTNS

LHYHHOMRPDOHOSR

QATEENOMLERHVYN

EBAXAYCTIRTNUWS

GETSTERFTCLLCIO

ETCAEOATEAITDSM

TFAFRYCXUUMOSXK

MASKJQYHCOLUMNA

OSYEOLYMPICSRGE

This grid is wider and taller than its box. Slide it to see every letter.To drag, hold the first letter for a moment, then slide.Keyboard: Tab to the grid, arrow keys to move, Enter on the first and last letter.

AthensATHENS
SpartaSPARTA
DemocracyDEMOCRACY
HopliteHOPLITE
MarathonMARATHON
AlexanderALEXANDER
PhilosopherPHILOSOPHER
PlatoPLATO
AlphabetALPHABET
ParthenonPARTHENON
ColumnCOLUMN
TheaterTHEATER
MaskMASK
OlympicsOLYMPICS
WreathWREATH
MythMYTH

16 of 24 words from the Ancient Greece Favorites list.

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Easy: words go across and down.

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Answer key: Ancient Greece Word Search

PNOFPHILOSOPHER

CRSFZMNRCACLGME

HWPYWAMKMLMALAU

YFABRRLDYELWPTD

IAREEAIETXPPLHA

OLTOATDLHAESAEO

HPARTHENONTFTNS

LHYHHOMRPDOHOSR

QATEENOMLERHVYN

EBAXAYCTIRTNUWS

GETSTERFTCLLCIO

ETCAEOATEAITDSM

TFAFRYCXUUMOSXK

MASKJQYHCOLUMNA

OSYEOLYMPICSRGE

ATHENS, SPARTA, DEMOCRACY, HOPLITE, MARATHON, ALEXANDER, PHILOSOPHER, PLATO, ALPHABET, PARTHENON, COLUMN, THEATER, MASK, OLYMPICS, WREATH, MYTH

Next step Make a puzzle from your own ancient Greece unit words Scramble these ancient Greece words

All 170 words

City-States and Places 25

Aegean The island-dotted sea between Greece and Anatolia.
Agora The open marketplace and meeting place at the heart of a Greek city.
Asia Minor An old name for Anatolia, the peninsula that is now Turkey, where the Ionian cities stood.
Athens The city-state in Attica, named for its patron goddess, where democracy began.
Attica The peninsula that juts out into the Aegean that holds Athens.
Boeotia The region north of Attica whose chief city was Thebes.
Byzantium The Greek colony on the Bosporus, founded by settlers from Megara, that later became Constantinople.
Corinth The wealthy trading city-state on the narrow isthmus that joins the Peloponnese to the mainland.
Delos The small island in the Cyclades honored as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.
Ephesus The Ionian city whose Temple of Artemis counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Hellas The Greeks' own name for their land.
Hellespont The narrow strait between Europe and Asia, now called the Dardanelles, that Xerxes crossed on bridges of boats.
Ionia The strip of Greek cities on the west coast of Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.

Show all 170 words (157 more)

City-States and Places, continued

Macedonia The kingdom on the edge of the Greek world ruled by Philip II and then by his son Alexander.
Miletus The Ionian city that was home to Thales, often called the first Greek philosopher.
Minoan The Bronze Age civilization of Crete, named by Arthur Evans after the legendary King Minos.
Mycenaean The last Bronze Age civilization of mainland Greece, about 1750 to 1050 BC, named for a fortress city.
Olympia The sanctuary of Zeus in the western Peloponnese where the ancient Olympic Games were held.
Peloponnese The large peninsula that forms southern Greece, home of Sparta, Corinth and Olympia.
Peninsula Land with water on three sides. Mainland Greece is one.
Persia The great empire to the east, ruled by Darius and then Xerxes, that invaded Greece twice.
Piraeus The port of Athens, joined to the city by the Long Walls.
Rhodes The island whose chief city raised the Colossus, a giant statue of the sun god Helios.
Sparta The city-state in Laconia, in the southeastern Peloponnese, ruled by two kings and famous for its army.
Syracuse The powerful Greek city in Sicily, founded by settlers from Corinth, where Archimedes lived.

Government and Daily Life 29

Agoge The strict state training that Spartan boys entered at the age of seven.
Amphora A tall jar with two handles and a narrow neck for storing and shipping wine and oil.
Archon A chief magistrate of Athens. The Athenians named each year after the man who held the top post.
Aristocracy Rule by the best, in practice by noble families. From the Greek aristos, best.
Assembly The meeting of citizens that voted on the laws of Athens. It met on the Pnyx, a hill.
Chiton The tunic of linen or wool, fastened at the shoulders, that Greeks wore.
Cleisthenes The reformer of 508 BC who is called the father of Athenian democracy.
Council The Boule of 500 citizens, 50 from each of the ten tribes, which prepared business for the Athenian assembly.
Deme A village or district of Attica. After Cleisthenes, a man had to be enrolled in one of the 139 to be a citizen.
Democracy Rule by the people. The word joins the Greek demos, people, and kratos, rule.
Drachma A silver coin worth six obols.
Draco The lawgiver who wrote down the first laws of Athens. They were so harsh that severe rules are still named after him.
Ephor One of five officials elected each year in Sparta who shared power with the two kings.
Gymnasium The place where Greek men and boys trained for sport and also met to talk and learn.
Helot One of the unfree people who farmed the land for the Spartans.
Himation The large cloak wrapped around the body over a tunic.
Jury In Athens, a large panel of citizens chosen by lot to decide a court case.
Lottery How Athens filled most public offices: by drawing names, not by election.
Metic A free foreigner living in Athens, who paid a special tax and could not vote.
Obol A small coin. Six made a drachma.
Oligarchy Rule by a few. From the Greek oligos, few.
Olive The tree whose fruit gave the Greeks oil for cooking and for lamps.
Ostracism The Athenian vote that sent a man away from the city for ten years. Votes were scratched on broken pottery.
Pericles The statesman who led Athens in its golden age and began the building of the Parthenon.
Polis A Greek city-state: a city and the farmland around it, with its own laws and army.
Pottery Black-figure and red-figure vases of fired clay show us scenes of Greek life.
Solon The Athenian lawgiver whose reforms brought debt relief, remembered as the shaking off of burdens.
Strategos One of ten generals elected each year in Athens. Pericles was voted back into the post year after year.
Tyrant In early Greece, a ruler who took power in a city-state by means outside the law.

Greek Wars and Warriors 28

Alexander The Macedonian king, called the Great, who by the age of 30 had built an empire from Greece to northwestern India.
Alexandria The city in Egypt founded by Alexander in 331 BC, later famous for its library and its lighthouse.
Bucephalus Alexander's famous horse.
Darius The Persian king whose army was beaten at Marathon in 490 BC.
Delian League The alliance of city-states led by Athens, founded in 478 BC, that first kept its treasury on the island of Delos.
Epaminondas The Theban general who won at Leuctra and freed the helots of Messenia.
Gaugamela The battle of 331 BC where Alexander defeated the Persian king Darius III.
Hellenistic The age that began with the death of Alexander in 323 BC, when Greek language and ideas spread far to the east.
Helmet Armor for the head. A hoplite often wore one topped with a horsehair crest.
Hoplite A citizen foot soldier armed with a spear and a large round shield.
Immortals The name Herodotus gives to the 10,000 picked foot soldiers who guarded the Persian king.
Leonidas The Spartan king who led the defense of the pass at Thermopylae.
Leuctra The battle of 371 BC where the army of Thebes broke the power of Sparta.
Long Walls The fortified corridor that linked Athens to its port at Piraeus.
Marathon The plain where Athens defeated a Persian army in 490 BC. The long-distance race is named for it.
Miltiades The Athenian general credited with the victory at Marathon.
Peloponnesian The name of the war of 431 to 404 BC between Athens and Sparta and their allies, which Sparta won.
Persian Wars The conflict of 499 to 449 BC in which Greek city-states turned back two invasions from the east.
Phalanx A block of foot soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder, many ranks deep.
Pheidippides The Athenian running courier at the center of the story that inspired the marathon race.
Philip The king of Macedon, second of his name and father of Alexander, who won control of Greece at Chaeronea in 338 BC.
Plataea The final land battle of the second Persian invasion, a Greek victory in August 479 BC.
Salamis The island strait where the outnumbered Greek fleet beat the Persian fleet in 480 BC.
Sarissa The very long pike that Philip II gave to the Macedonian phalanx.
Themistocles The Athenian who persuaded his city to build 200 triremes and commanded its navy at Salamis.
Thermopylae The narrow pass where King Leonidas, 300 Spartans and their Greek allies made their stand in 480 BC.
Trireme A fast warship driven by 170 oars in three rows, with one man to each oar.
Xerxes The Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC.

Thinkers and Writers 34

Academy The school Plato founded outside the walls of Athens about 387 BC.
Aesop The storyteller whose name is on a famous collection of animal fables.
Alphabet A word made from alpha and beta. The Greeks took the Phoenician letters and turned some of them into vowels.
Archimedes The mathematician and inventor of Syracuse who is said to have shouted Eureka after stepping into a bath.
Aristarchus The astronomer from Samos who proposed that the Earth goes around the Sun.
Aristotle The pupil of Plato who tutored Alexander the Great and founded the Lyceum.
Atom The smallest piece of matter in the theory of Democritus. Its Greek name means "uncuttable".
Delta The fourth Greek letter, shaped like a triangle. River mouths of that shape are named for it.
Democritus The thinker remembered for his theory that everything is made of tiny particles that cannot be cut.
Dialogue A written conversation. Plato set out his philosophy in this form.
Diogenes The philosopher who, in the stories, lived in a large jar in Athens.
Eratosthenes The chief librarian at Alexandria, the first known person to calculate the distance around the Earth.
Euclid The mathematician of Alexandria who wrote the Elements and is called the father of geometry.
Eureka "I have found it!" in Greek.
Fable A short story, often about animals, that teaches a lesson.
Geometry The mathematics of shapes. The word is Greek for "earth measurement".
Herodotus The writer of the Histories, an account of the Persian Wars. Cicero called him the Father of History.
Hippocrates The physician from the island of Kos who is traditionally called the Father of Medicine.
History From the Greek historia, a word for inquiry.
Library Alexandria's ranked among the biggest and most important of the ancient world.
Logic The study of correct reasoning. Aristotle wrote the oldest known organized study of it.
Lyceum The school Aristotle founded in Athens in 334 BC.
Omega The twenty-fourth and last Greek letter.
Orator A skilled public speaker, such as Demosthenes of Athens.
Philosopher A "lover of wisdom", from the Greek philo, loving, and sophia, wisdom.
Plato The pupil of Socrates who wrote dialogues, including the Republic, and founded the Academy.
Pythagoras The thinker from Samos whose name is on the theorem about the sides of a right triangle.
Rhetoric The art of persuasive speaking, prized in the assembly and the courts.
Sappho The poet from the island of Lesbos, known for lyric poetry written to be sung.
Socrates The Athenian thinker who taught by asking questions and wrote nothing down. He died in 399 BC.
Stoic A follower of Zeno, who taught at a painted porch in Athens. Today the word means someone who bears trouble calmly.
Thales The thinker from Miletus who looked for natural causes and not myths to explain the world.
Theorem A mathematical statement that has been proved.
Thucydides The Athenian general who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Arts and Olympic Games 36

Acropolis The "high city": the rocky hill above Athens crowned with temples.
Aeschylus The playwright often called the father of tragedy, who fought at Marathon.
Aristophanes The comic playwright of The Clouds, The Birds and The Frogs.
Athlete A person who trains for and competes in sports.
Bronze The metal, a mix of copper and tin, used for Greek armor and many statues.
Chorus The group of performers who sang, danced and commented on the action in a Greek play.
Column An upright pillar holding up a roof. The Greeks built them in three styles.
Comedy A funny play that often mocked the powerful. Eleven by Aristophanes survive.
Corinthian The most ornate style of Greek column, its top carved with acanthus leaves.
Discus A heavy disk thrown for distance.
Doric The plainest style of Greek column, which stands on the floor with no base.
Drama A story acted on a stage. The word comes from a Greek word for "deed" or "act".
Epidaurus The sanctuary town whose theater, admired for its acoustics, is still used for plays today.
Euripides The playwright of Medea and The Trojan Women.
Frieze The wide band above the columns of a temple, often filled with carved figures.
Hippodrome The course for horse races and chariot races.
Ionic The style of Greek column with a pair of scrolls, called volutes, at the top.
Javelin A light spear thrown for distance.
Marble The fine white stone of Greek temples and statues. Athens cut it from Mount Pentelicus.
Mask Actors in a Greek play wore one over the face. Men played the women's parts too.
Olympics The games held every four years at Olympia in honor of Zeus, by tradition from 776 BC.
Orchestra In a Greek theater, the circular floor where the chorus performed. The word means dancing place.
Parthenon The marble temple of Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, built between 447 and 432 BC.
Pediment The low triangular space under the roof at each end of a temple, often filled with statues.
Pentathlon The five-event contest: running, long jump, discus, javelin and wrestling.
Phidias The sculptor who made the giant gold and ivory Athena that stood inside the Parthenon.
Sophocles The playwright of Oedipus Rex and Antigone.
Stadium From stadion, the short footrace that was the only event of the earliest Olympic Games.
Statue A carved or cast figure of a person, a god or an animal.
Theater A place for plays, with rows of seats built into the slope of a hill around a circular floor.
Thespis According to Aristotle, the first person to step onto a stage and act a character's part. Actors are still called thespians.
Tragedy A serious play in which the hero comes to a sad end.
Truce A pause in fighting. A sacred one let athletes and visitors travel safely to Olympia.
Vase A painted clay jar.
Wreath An Olympic winner's prize: a crown of wild olive leaves.
Wrestling The sport in which two athletes try to throw each other to the ground.

Gods and Festivals 18

Altar The block or table, usually out in the open air, where offerings were made to a god.
Athena Goddess of wisdom and protector of the city that carries her name.
Dionysia The Athenian festival of the god Dionysus at which playwrights competed. The winners were crowned with ivy.
Dodona The oracle of Zeus in Epirus, where priests and priestesses listened to the rustling of a sacred oak.
Eleusis The town near Athens known for its secret rites of Demeter, called the Mysteries.
Festival A holy day with processions, offerings, contests and plays.
Hymn A song of praise to a god.
Libation A drink, often wine, poured out as a gift to a god.
Myth A traditional story about gods and heroes that explained how the world came to be as it is.
Offering A gift left for a god, such as food, wine or a small clay figure.
Olympus The highest mountain in Greece and, in Greek belief, the home of the gods.
Omphalos The "navel" stone at Delphi that marked the center of the world.
Priestess A woman who served a goddess or god.
Procession A solemn parade. The frieze of the Parthenon shows one.
Pythia The priestess at Delphi who spoke the answers of Apollo.
Sanctuary A sacred place set apart for a god, such as Olympia or Delphi.
Shrine A small holy place, often holding the image of a god.
Zeus King of the gods, honored at Olympia.

How this list was compiled: 170 ancient Greece words in 6 themed lists, chosen and defined for this site. Dates, names and places in the clues were checked on 2026-09-19 against the English Wikipedia article for each entry, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peloponnesian_War and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Olympic_Games. Licence: own work

How it works

The first puzzle of this ancient Greece word search PDF holds 16 of 24 favorites, Parthenon, Hoplite and Marathon among them. Six themed lists stand behind it: 170 words in all, each with its own clue.

Read the full guide

Pick a list, then keep it as a PDF

Start from a list offers City-States and Places (25), Government and Daily Life (29), Greek Wars and Warriors (28), Thinkers and Writers (34), Arts and Olympic Games (36) and Gods and Festivals (18). Choose one and press Print or save as PDF. A computer lists Save as PDF among its printers; a phone opens a print preview to save or share.

Clues that teach Greek word roots

Many English words in this ancient Greek word search are Greek, and their clues say so. Democracy joins demos, people, and kratos, rule. Geometry is Greek for "earth measurement", and the Atom clue ends with "uncuttable". Tick Show clues, not words, in More options and the sheet becomes a vocabulary lesson. About 16 clues fit one page.

Zeus, Myth, Mask and Vase are among the 32 words of Easy Ancient Greece; take words off the list until 8 are left.
Teaching the temple diagram? Doric, Ionic and Corinthian sit in Arts and Olympic Games beside Column, Frieze, Pediment and Marble.
Hard Ancient Greece runs up to Peloponnesian, 13 letters. Press Hard and Themistocles may run backwards or diagonally.

Questions and answers

How is this different from the Greek mythology word search?

This is the history puzzle: city-states, government, wars, thinkers and the arts. Gods and Festivals, its shortest list, is about worship: Altar, Shrine, Pythia, Dionysia. Only Zeus, Athena, Olympus, Athens, Sparta and Myth also appear in the Greek mythology word search.

Which spellings of the Greek names does the puzzle use?

Names follow the titles of their English Wikipedia articles: Pheidippides, Cleisthenes, Thucydides, Aeschylus. Everyday words use American spelling, so Theater ends in er. If your book spells a name another way, type your own list into the word search maker.

Are the dates and numbers in the clues reliable?

Each date, name and number was checked in September 2026 against the English Wikipedia article on its subject. Where the article hedges, the clue hedges too: the Olympics run "by tradition from 776 BC", and Archimedes "is said to have shouted Eureka".

All 170 words

City-States and Places 25

City-States and Places, continued

Government and Daily Life 29

Greek Wars and Warriors 28

Thinkers and Writers 34

Arts and Olympic Games 36

Gods and Festivals 18

How it works

Pick a list, then keep it as a PDF

Clues that teach Greek word roots

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