Greek loanwords in modern Romanian occupy three clearly delimited semantic fields, with a fourth, more diffuse layer of expressive vocabulary that emerged through colloquial use.

Church and Religion

The oldest and most stable layer. Greek was the language of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople, and church vocabulary traveled with it: terms for liturgical objects, devotional practices, and ecclesiastical administration. See constantinople-patriarchate and byzantine-greek-vocabulary.

Administration and Court

Greek served as the language of princely courts, especially during the phanariot-period (1711–1821). Court titles, political terminology, and administrative vocabulary entered Romanian through Greek-speaking Phanariot rulers. This layer includes terms like catadicsi ("to deign, to condescend"), documented in sapovici-mic-glosar-expresive.md as one of the most widespread Phanariot administrative borrowings. See sapovici-outcome-greek-loanwords.

Commerce and Market

Trade Greek provided a layer of commercial vocabulary — market terms, weights and measures, merchant language. The verb agonisi ("to acquire through effort, to gain by hard work"), first attested in the early 16th-century Psaltirea Hurmuzaki, entered Romanian via commercial Byzantine-Greek contact, as documented in sapovici-note-etimologice.

Expressive and Colloquial Vocabulary

The most studied and most degraded layer. Sapovici's Mic Glosar de Cuvinte Expresive documents over 100 Romanian words borrowed from (Neo-)Greek that underwent stylistic-depreciation. Words like ghiptui ("to overfeed, to gorge"), mitocan ("lout, boor"), and lefter ("penniless, broke") shifted from neutral or prestige use to marked colloquial or pejorative status after the phanariot-period ended in 1821. See sapovici-soarta-imprumuturilor.

Key Pattern

As byzantine-greek-vocabulary notes, many words attributed to Greek origin may actually have entered via Turkish intermediary — Greek borrowings from Turkish (e.g. καφές ← kahve). The Greek and Turkish layers overlapped geographically and chronologically, making clean separation difficult. See turkisms.

The semantic distribution reflects the three historical periods of Greek influence identified in sapovici-outcome-greek-loanwords: Old Greek via Latin substrate, Medieval/Byzantine Greek, and Neo-Greek during the Phanariot period — with the Phanariot layer being the most semantically dense and the most stylistically degraded in modern Romanian.

Sources: byzantine-greek-vocabulary, sapovici-outcome-greek-loanwords, sapovici-note-etimologice, sapovici-mic-glosar-expresive, sapovici-soarta-imprumuturilor, turkisms, phanariot-period, constantinople-patriarchate