greeks

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of greek.

   Local greeks organized fundraisers throughout the semester.

   The greeks on campus competed fiercely in the annual games.

   Note

   Only the countable meanings of greek can be counted this way: people from Greece or of Greek descent, members of a US college fraternity or sorority, and, in archaic slang, cunning rogues. The food, the gibberish and the placeholder text never pluralize. On a campus, the greeks are the fraternity and sorority members taken as a body, the sense the colloquial plural most often carries.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of greek.

   The page-layout tool greeks any text below a set size to keep the preview quick.

   Whenever the mockup loads, the app greeks the body copy into faint gray bars.

   Note

   A transitive form, always followed by what is being blurred: a layout program greeks small text, a designer greeks a template with lorem ipsum, a production greeks an unlicensed logo. The older meaning, to cheat at cards, is obsolete, so a modern reader meets this form in design and production work. The spelling is shared with the plural noun, but the verb always takes an object.

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