26.183 Forms of the Present Imperative

As you will see, the imperative has second person forms, used for issuing commands to a person you are directly addressing. This is how we make commands in English: "Do this! Don't do that!"

Greek also has third person imperative forms, which is rather difficult for English speakers to understand. A third person imperative means that you are giving orders to someone, but not addressing them directly. This can be difficult to translate into English. Usually the phrase "let him do this!" or "don't let them do that!" is used in order to convey the sense of the Greek third person imperative. The third person imperative is very distinctive because of the τω or θω that appears in all forms of the third person imperative.

Although you are not required to generate or parse the imperative verb forms, you need to be able to recognize and understand them. Make sure you study the forms on this page carefully. The chart below shows ALL the imperative forms so that you can compare the present active, present middle/passive, aorist active, aorist middle, and aorist passive forms. Here are some things to note:

• present imperative, second person plural: the forms of the present indicative tense and present imperative are identical for the second person plural, but the context of the sentence will usually make it very clear if you are dealing with a present tense verb or with an imperative.
• present middle and present passive: as you would expect the forms of the present middle and present passive imperatives are identical
• aorist imperatives: as you would expect, the aorist imperatives do not take augment (only the aorist past tense takes augment - the aorist infinitives, participles, subjunctives and imperatives do not take augment)
• aorist middle and aorist passive: as you would expect, there are distinct forms for the aorist middle and aorist passive imperatives
• second aorist: there are distinct endings for the second aorist active and middle imperatives

Imperatives Chart