Deponent Verbs (-ομαι only)

Some of the most common verbs in Greek wear the mediopassive -ομαι ending but have nothing passive, reflexive or reciprocal about them at all. έρχομαι means "I come," κάθομαι means "I sit," γίνομαι means "I become" — plain, active meanings, dressed in a passive-looking shape. These are the deponent verbs (Greek αποθετικά, "laid-aside" verbs, from a Latin grammatical term): they have laid aside the active voice and live only in the mediopassive. This is the fifth job of the -ομαι ending — the one where the voice carries no extra meaning and is simply the form the verb happens to have.

There is no active twin

The defining fact is a negative one. For an ordinary verb like πλένω, the -ομαι form (πλένομαι) is derived from an active base (πλένω). For a deponent, there is no active base to derive from. You cannot say ×έρχω for "I come," or ×κάθω for "I sit," or ×γίνω as a present indicative — those forms do not exist in the language. (You will meet να γίνω and να έρθω; those are the perfective forms of the same deponent, not an active voice — see below.) The -ομαι shape is the dictionary form, the equivalent of an infinitive in an English dictionary. When you meet έρχομαι, don't hunt for a "real" active underneath it; there isn't one, and the -ομαι is as neutral as the -ω on γράφω.

The everyday deponents you cannot avoid

Deponents are not a rare curiosity; they include a big slice of the verbs an A2–B1 learner uses every hour. They cluster around a few meaning-types — motion and position, thinking and feeling — which is no accident: these were middle-voice verbs already in Ancient Greek, and they never grew an active. Here is the working inventory:

One near-miss is worth naming, because it is the commonest false positive. βιάζομαι ("I'm in a hurry") looks deponent, but it is not: the active βιάζω exists and means "to rush someone, to pressure someone" (Μη βιάζεις το παιδί — "don't rush the child"). βιάζομαι is an ordinary mediopassive that has simply drifted to a fixed meaning. Apply the test honestly and it fails — which is precisely why the test is worth applying.

The forms that look active — and are

One more surprise, and it is the reason the "there is no active" line needs a footnote. Deponents do have forms that look perfectly active: the dependent (the bare form after να and θα) and the imperative. Θέλω να γίνω γιατρός, πρέπει να έρθεις, θα κάτσω λίγο, έλα εδώ, σκέψου το. None of these is an "active voice" of the verb — they are the perfective forms of the same deponent, and the -ομαι family simply does not carry mediopassive endings there. So the rule is narrower than it first looks: there is no active present (×έρχω, ×κάθω), but there is very much a να έρθω.

The four verbs of the contracted -άμαι family — θυμάμαι, φοβάμαι, λυπάμαι, κοιμάμαι — have their own slightly irregular present, laid out in full on the -ούμαι and -άμαι mediopassive. The rest follow the ordinary -ομαι present.

They conjugate like any passive — in the present and imperfect

The good news: in the durative tenses (present and imperfect), a deponent conjugates exactly like the passive of a normal verb. You already know the endings from πλένομαι / πλενόμουν; έρχομαι just plugs into the same slots.

The aorist: the one place it gets slippery

Here is the honest difficulty, and it is worth stating plainly rather than pretending deponents are tidy. In the aorist (the one-off past), deponents split into two unpredictable camps, and you simply have to learn which camp each verb is in.

• A handful of the most frequent deponents take an irregular, active-looking aorist: έρχομαι → ήρθα, γίνομαι → έγινα, κάθομαι → κάθισα. These end in the active-style -α, not in the passive -ηκα, even though the present is mediopassive.
• Most deponents take the regular passive aorist in -θηκα / -στηκα: σκέφτομαι → σκέφτηκα, φοβάμαι → φοβήθηκα, θυμάμαι → θυμήθηκα, εργάζομαι → εργάστηκα, δέχομαι → δέχτηκα, χρειάζομαι → χρειάστηκα.

There is no rule that predicts the camp from the present — you memorise the aorist of each deponent as you learn it, exactly as you memorise any English irregular past. The two frontrunners, ήρθα and έγινα, come up so often that they fix themselves within a week.

The two commonest of all — έρχομαι and γίνομαι — have every tense, plus their imperatives and idioms, laid out on their own pages: έρχομαι and γίνομαι.

Common Mistakes

1. Inventing an active form. The single biggest deponent error: building ×έρχω, ×κάθω, ×σκέφτω because "the meaning is active."

2. Forcing the -θηκα aorist onto an active-style deponent. έρχομαι does not give ×ήρθηκα in the aorist — its past is the irregular ήρθα.

3. Reading a deponent as a passive. δέχομαι means "I accept, I receive," not "I am accepted"; the -ομαι carries no passive sense here, so an English passive has to be rebuilt, not translated word for word.

4. Dropping the mediopassive spelling. As with every -ομαι verb, the endings are written with αι, not ε — χρειάζομαι, not ×χρειάζομε.

Key Takeaways

• Deponents exist only in the mediopassive -ομαι form but have active meaning: έρχομαι (come), κάθομαι (sit), γίνομαι (become), θυμάμαι (remember), φοβάμαι (fear), σκέφτομαι (think), εργάζομαι (work), δέχομαι (accept), χρειάζομαι (need).
• There is no active twin — ×έρχω, ×κάθω, ×σκέφτω do not exist; the -ομαι form is the dictionary form.
• In the present and imperfect they conjugate exactly like the passive of a normal verb (έρχομαι / ερχόμουν).
• The aorist is unpredictable: a few frequent ones are active-style (ήρθα, έγινα, κάθισα), most take the regular passive -θηκα (σκέφτηκα, φοβήθηκα, δέχτηκα) — learn each one as you meet it.
• The English-speaker trap is to manufacture an active; don't. The -ομαι here is neutral, exactly like the -ω on γράφω.