εργάζομαι (to work)

εργάζομαι means “work,” but its natural home is institutional language: CVs, contracts, job advertisements, news and official announcements. In ordinary conversation, δουλεύω normally does the same job. English uses work comfortably in both settings; Greek makes the register contrast lexical. The morphology is deponent—mediopassive forms with an active meaning—and the general pattern belongs on deponent verbs.

Principal parts

The learned aorist εργάσθηκα has not disappeared; it remains current in careful administrative prose beside εργάστηκα. The commands εργάσου / εργαστείτε are likewise formally possible and occur in written instructions, but they are highly marked in speech. A speaker normally recasts the request with δούλεψε / δουλέψτε.

The present stem presents work as an activity or continuing arrangement: εργάζομαι εδώ. The aorist εργάστηκα packages a dated or otherwise bounded period of employment, while έχω εργαστεί presents prior experience as relevant now. That is why CV language naturally alternates between the aorist for a dated post and the perfect for accumulated experience; the formal verb does not change the ordinary Greek aspect system.

The register doublet

These two sentences report exactly the same workplace. The first sounds suitable for a CV or interview; the second is what most people would say aloud to a friend.

Government

εργάζομαι is intransitive: its workplace, capacity and terms arrive in prepositional phrases, not as direct objects.

σε and για are not interchangeable labels. Εργάζομαι στην εταιρεία places the employment at an organization; Εργάζομαι για την εταιρεία names the organization or client whose interests the work serves and need not imply presence at its offices. With a profession, ως marks capacity and the following noun agrees with the worker: Η Μαρία εργάζεται ως μεταφράστρια. None of these phrases is a direct object, so the verb remains syntactically intransitive even when an English translation has work for or work as.

εργαζόμενος as a noun

The participle has become the normal institutional noun employee. It still agrees like an adjective, but it can stand alone with an article.

Set phrases

• εργάζομαι σκληρά — work hard
• εργάζομαι στο δημόσιο — work in the public sector
• χώρος εργασίας — workplace
• εργασιακά δικαιώματα — employment rights
• οι εργαζόμενοι και οι συνταξιούχοι — employees and pensioners

Common Mistakes

In Standard Modern Greek, the employment verb is mediopassive in form: εργάζομαι, not active ×εργάζω. Historical and dialectal εργάζω is attested with other status, so the precise claim is about the standard modern employment paradigm—not that the string never occurred anywhere in Greek.

Do not automatically replace δουλειά with εργασία. η δουλειά is the everyday job or task; η εργασία is an assignment, a piece of work, or employment discussed abstractly. That distinction is explained with the wider learned doublet on register doublets.

The noun family also divides by function. χώρος εργασίας and συνθήκες εργασίας are fixed institutional collocations; έχω δουλειά is the natural conversational “I have work / I am busy.” A student submits μια εργασία, but someone looking for paid employment says ψάχνω δουλειά in ordinary speech. The choice is lexical as well as stylistic, so translating every English work mechanically as εργασία produces unnatural Greek.

Key Takeaways

• εργάζομαι · εργαζόμουν · εργάστηκα / εργάσθηκα · να εργαστώ · έχω εργαστεί.
• Use it for institutional or careful employment language; use δουλεύω in everyday speech.
• Workplace σε, capacity ως, terms με; there is no active ×εργάζω.
• ο εργαζόμενος / η εργαζόμενη is the ordinary institutional noun for an employee.