Why Do Fraternities and Sororities Have Greek Letters for Names? - Tales of Times Forgotten (2024)

Today I am going to answer one of the truly big questions. It is one of the questions everyone has been wondering for years but never learned the answer to: “Why do fraternities and sororities have Greek letters for names?” I mean, why? Who came up with that idea? Why did it continue? Well, today you are going to finally learn the answer—but it is far stranger and frankly far more hilariously silly than you possibly ever imagined before now.

Some historical context

First, let us go into a little historical context. In the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s, higher education was almost completely dominated by the study of Latin and Ancient Greek. Prospective students were required to already know Latin in order to even apply to undergraduate school at most universities.

Ancient Greek, meanwhile, was widely seen as an even more prestigious language than Latin. Latin was taught to most schoolboys; whereas if you wanted to learn Greek, you had to go to university. Knowing Ancient Greek meant you were a well-bred, cultured gentleman—a real kalos kagathos.

The only language more prestigious than Ancient Greek was Hebrew, which was taught only to those university students who had mastered both Latin and Greek. That is why the official motto of Yale University, which was founded in 1702, is in Hebrew: אורים ותמים (ʾÛrîm wə-Tummîm), meaning “Light and Truth.” You could not get more pretentious than that!

ABOVE: Official crest of Yale University, with their Hebrew motto emblazoned across the pages of the book and the Latin translation of it (“Lux et Veritas”) written on the banner beneath it for the less enlightened

Introducing the Phi Beta Kappa Society

The very first Greek letter organization, the one that started the whole madness of Greek letter names, was the Phi Beta Kappa Society, an elite academic honor society founded on December 5, 1776 at the College of William and Mary. The society seems to have originally been very briefly called Societas Philosophae, which is Latin for “Society of Philosophy.”

Long before the Phi Beta Kappa Society was founded, there was already a longstanding tradition of organizations with Latin letter names at the College of William and Mary. The earliest recorded Latin-letter society at the College of William and Mary was the F.H.C. (whose name stood for “Flat Hat Club”), which was founded in 1750. The American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (who graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1764) was a member of it. Another Latin-letter society, the P.D.A. Society (who name stood for “Please Don’t Ask”) was founded in March of 1773.

The Phi Beta Kappa Society, however, wanted to seem really prestigious and academic, so, instead of picking a Latin letter name like a common organization, they chose a motto in Ancient Greek: Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophía Bíou Kybernḗtēs), which means, “Philosophy is the Guide of Life.” Eventually, the acronym for this motto became the name of the organization itself.

ABOVE: Key of the Phi Beta Kappa Society

The development of other Greek letter organizations

As soon as the Phi Beta Kappa Society named itself after a Greek acronym, other organizations started imitating them. At first, the names of all Greek letter organizations stood for mottos in Ancient Greek, which were often kept secret and revealed only to initiates.

Most of these early Greek letter organizations were not exactly what we think of today when we hear the word “fraternities,” though. Although some Greek letter organizations in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries certainly bore a number of resemblances to modern fraternities, they were still basically thought of as elite honor societies and they were not nearly as prominent on college campuses as fraternities and sororities usually are today.

Ironically, it was in the late nineteenth century, when the influence of classical Greek and Latin was waning, that social fraternities first became truly prominent on American college campuses. Eventually, as knowledge of Ancient Greek became less common and the study of the language became a less integral part of the American university system, most Greek letter organizations stopped having Greek mottos.

Nonetheless, these organizations continued to use Greek letters in their names because that was what they had always done and, by the time they stopped having Greek mottos, Greek letter names had become traditional.

The emergence of sororities

The first social organization for college women was the Adelphean Society, which was founded in 1851 at Wesleyan Female College, a small, private, women’s college in central Georgia. The original name of this society came from the Greek word ἀδελφός (adelphós), which means “sibling” and could be used to refer to a brother or a sister. It was later renamed Alpha Delta Pi.

Originally, Greek letter organizations for women were not called sororities, but rather “female fraternities.” A Latin professor at Syracuse University named Dr. Frank Smalley, however, objected to this word, noting that frater means “brother” in Latin, so a “female fraternity” literally means “female brotherhood,” which he insisted was ridiculous and an oxymoron. Therefore, the esteemed Dr. Smalley insisted that they should be rightly called “sororities,” from Latin soror, meaning “sister.” The name eventually caught on.

ABOVE: Photograph of an old building on the campus of Wesleyan Female College, where the first sorority was founded in 1851

Conclusion

Basically, the whole reason why modern fraternities and sororities use Greek letters for their names is because an honor society over 200 years ago was being super-pretentious and everyone else followed along until eventually they all just forgot why they started naming themselves after Greek letters to begin with. Nowadays the names of most fraternities and sororities are just random jumbles of meaningless Greek letters that do not stand for anything.