/ɪts ˌɔːl ˈɡɹiːk tə ˌmiː/
English idiom, informal. I can’t understand any of it.
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use It’s all Greek to me
?
Informal and self-mocking: you say it about instructions, jargon, a contract or a math problem that you can’t follow. The subject shifts freely (“this is all Greek to me”, “physics is Greek to me”, “it was all Greek to me”), but the “to me” stays, because it’s almost always about the speaker. Greek takes a capital G.
Also said it’s Greek to me, that’s Greek to me, that’s all Greek to me
It’s all Greek to me
in real sentences
-
It’s all Greek to me.
Tatoeba, sentence by Zifre, CC BY 2.0 FR
-
That was all Greek to me.
Tatoeba, sentence by blay_paul, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does It’s all Greek to me
come from?
The first recorded English use is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), where Casca says of a speech Cicero gave in Greek: “for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” Thomas Dekker used “it’s Greek to him” in Patient Grissel (1603), so Shakespeare wasn’t alone. A popular theory traces it to medieval scribes who wrote “Graecum est; non legitur” (“it’s Greek, it can’t be read”) beside Greek passages they couldn’t copy, but Wikipedia and Phrase Finder both treat that as a likely ancestor rather than a proven one.
Mistakes learners make with It’s all Greek to me
Saying “it’s all Greek for me”. The idiom takes “to me”. Swapping in your own language’s version (“it’s Chinese to me”, “it’s Spanish to me”) will usually be understood, but it isn’t the English set phrase.
Other English idioms like It’s all Greek to me
Spot a mistake in It’s all Greek to me
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.