“It’s Greek to me”: meaning, origin and examples

Meaning

The phrase is about things that are too technical, complicated or unclear for you: instructions, a contract, someone’s handwriting, a talk full of jargon. It isn’t about Greek, and it isn’t rude to Greek people. Greek is just the example of a language that is hard to read if you never learned it.

How to use it

It’s very often said with all: It’s all Greek to me. For something in the past, use was: The lecture was all Greek to me.

Greek always has a capital G, and there’s no article: Greek to me, not a Greek or the Greek. You can also use it about other people: It’s all Greek to my parents.

Where it comes from

English speakers know it from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599). Casca reports that Cicero spoke in Greek and says, for mine own part, it was Greek to me. The idea is older: medieval scribes copying Latin texts wrote Graecum est; non legitur (“It’s Greek; it can’t be read”) when they reached Greek words they couldn’t read. Other languages pick a different language for the same idea: in Spanish, something hard to understand sounds like Chinese (me suena a chino).

Examples

• I tried to read the instructions for the new printer, but it was all Greek to me.
• My brother explained how cryptocurrency works. Honestly, it’s Greek to me.
• The contract is full of legal terms that are Greek to most people.

Similar phrases

It’s over my head (it’s too difficult for me to understand) and I can’t make head or tail of it (I can’t understand it at all) are close in meaning.