665 A class of words called Particles, some of them conjunctions, some adverbs, some both at once, are used freely in Greek to make clearer certain relations between ideas. Most of the ordinary conjunctions have practical equivalents in English, and hence make no difficulty. (See, e. g., 602.) But for some of the commonest particles, adverbial in character, or partly adverbial and partly conjunctional, English has no precise equivalents in separate words; we express only by stress, by pauses, and by tones or changes of pitch (speech-tune) what in Greek is fully expressed, by these particles and by word-order, on the printed page. The force of such particles can be really learned only by observation in reading, especially while reading aloud and while listening to such reading. The following sections (666, 667, 668, 669, 670, 671, 672, 673) describe briefly the more distinct meanings of the particles that most require attention, although such a description can not be very exact.

Particles which can not begin a clause are postpositive, and are marked in the following list by an asterisk, as *ἄν.