title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal holds the all-time men's record for the most major singles titles in tennis history, with 22. He stands alone in the Open Era as the player with the most clay court titles (63), consisting of an all-time record 14 French Open titles, 12 Barcelona Open titles, 11 Monte-Carlo Masters titles, and 10 Italian Open titles. His 14 French Open titles are a record at any single tournament, and he is the sole title leader in three key tiers of the ATP Tour; Grand Slam, ATP Masters 1000, and ATP 500. Nadal holds the record for the longest single-surface win streak in matches (81 on clay) and in sets (50 on clay) in the history of the Open Era. Nadal's dominance on clay is reflected by his honorific title as the "King of Clay", and he is widely regarded as the greatest clay-court player in history. Nadal's records and evolution into an all-court champion have established him as one of the greatest players in tennis history, with some former tennis players and analysts considering him to be the greatest tennis player of all time.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Former tennis player and eight-time Grand Slam champion Andre Agassi picked Nadal as the greatest of all time because of the way the Spaniard "had to deal with Federer, Djokovic, Murray in the golden age of tennis". Nadal leads the head-to-head record at majors against the other members of the Big Three and holds the record for the most majors won beating a Big Three member en-route (13).


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal is one of two men, along with Agassi, to win the Olympic gold medal as well as the four majors in singles in his career, a feat known as a Career Golden Slam. He is the only male player in history to complete the Career Grand Slam and win an Olympic gold medal in both singles and doubles. He is one of four men in history, along with Roy Emerson, Rod Laver and Djokovic, to complete the double Career Grand Slam in singles.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In 2010, Nadal became the first man to achieve the Surface Slam by winning majors on three different surfaces (clay, grass and hard courts) in the same calendar year. At the age of 24, he became the youngest player in the Open Era to complete the Career Grand Slam, and one of three men, along with Mats Wilander and Djokovic, to win at least two majors on each surface (Double Career Surface Slam). The same year, he became the only player in history to win all three Masters clay court tournaments (Monte-Carlo, Madrid, Rome) and the French Open in a calendar year, a feat known as a Clay Slam. In 2017, Nadal achieved "La Décima" (Spanish: the tenth) by becoming the only man with ten titles at a single major, following similar feats at the Monte-Carlo Masters and Barcelona Open. In 2020, Nadal became the first player to win the French Open in three different decades. In 2022, he went on to become the first man to win multiple majors in three separate decades.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal holds the all-time records for the most years (15) winning at least one major (2005–2014, 2017–2020, 2022), the most consecutive years (10) winning a major (2005–2014), the most majors won without losing a set (4), the most match wins at a single major (112 at the French Open), and the highest match-winning percentage at clay court majors (97.4%), among many others. He holds the Open Era records for the highest career match-winning percentage (83.3%), the highest clay court match-winning percentage (91.3%), the highest outdoor match-winning percentage (84.9%), and the most consecutive seasons winning at least one tournament (19 years) and two tournaments (18 years) respectively. He has won the most outdoor Masters titles (35), Big Titles (58), and ATP Tour titles (90) in the Open Era. Nadal is the only man to have been ranked world No. 1 in three different decades (2000s, 2010s, and 2020s). He also holds the record for the most wins against world No. 1 ranked players (23). He has been ranked in the Top 10 of the ATP rankings consecutively since April 2005 – a record spanning over 900 weeks. He played an instrumental role in taking Spain to five Davis Cup crowns, and is the winner of two Olympic gold medals.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Among his numerous career accolades, Nadal was named the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year in 2011 and 2021. He is an honorary recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Dos De Mayo, the Grand Cross of Naval Merit, the Princess of Asturias Award, and the Medal of the City of Paris. He was also included in "Time" magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2022.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal's playing style and personality has been described by Jimmy Connors: "He's built out of a mold that I think I came from also, that you walk out there, you give everything you have from the first point to the end no matter what the score. And you're willing to lay it all out on the line and you're not afraid to let the people see that."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal generally plays an aggressive, behind-the-baseline game founded on heavy topspin groundstrokes, consistency, speedy footwork and tenacious court coverage, thus making him an aggressive counterpuncher. Known for his athleticism and speed around the court, Nadal is an excellent defender who hits well on the run, constructing winning plays from seemingly defensive positions. He also plays very fine dropshots, which work especially well because his heavy topspin often forces opponents to the back of the court.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal employs a semi-western grip forehand, often with a "lasso-whip" follow-through, where his left arm hits through the ball and finishes above his left shoulder – as opposed to a more traditional finish across the body or around his opposite shoulder. Nadal's forehand groundstroke form allows him to hit shots with heavy topspin – more so than many of his contemporaries.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: San Francisco tennis researcher John Yandell used a high-speed video camera and special software to count the average number of revolutions of a tennis ball hit full force by Nadal. Yandell concluded:


title: Rafael Nadal

text: While Nadal's shots tend to land short of the baseline, the characteristically high bounces his forehands achieve tend to mitigate the advantage an opponent would normally gain from capitalizing on a short ball. Although his forehand is based on heavy topspin, he can hit the ball deep and flat with a more orthodox follow through for clean winners.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal's serve was initially considered a weak point in his game, although his improvements in both first-serve points won and break points saved since 2005 have allowed him to consistently compete for and win major titles on faster surfaces. Nadal relies on the consistency of his serve to gain a strategic advantage in points, rather than going for service winners. However, before the 2010 US Open, he altered his service motion, arriving in the trophy pose earlier and pulling the racket lower during the trophy pose. Before the 2010 US Open, Nadal modified his service grip to a more continental one. These two changes in his serve increased his average speed by around 10 mph during the 2010 US Open, maxing out at 135 mph (217 km/h), allowing him to win more free points on his serve. Since the 2010 US Open, Nadal's serve speed dropped to previous levels and was again cited as in need of improvement. From 2019 onwards, several analysts praised Nadal's improvement on the serve, noting the speed of his serve had increased.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: After signing his new coach Carlos Moyá in December 2016, Nadal's game style acquired a more offensive approach. Under Moyá's direction, Nadal improved his serve, and incorporated serve-and-volley as a surprise tactic in some of his matches.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal is a clay court specialist, in the sense that he has been extremely successful on that surface. He has won 14 times at the French Open, 12 at Barcelona, 11 at Monte Carlo, and 10 at Rome. However, Nadal has shed that label owing to his success on other surfaces, including holding simultaneous Grand Slam tournament titles on grass, hard courts, and clay on two separate occasions, winning ten Masters titles on hard court, and winning an Olympic gold medal on hard court.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Despite praise for Nadal's talent and skill, in the past, some had questioned his longevity in the sport, citing his build and playing style as conducive to injury. Nadal himself has admitted to the physical toll hard courts place on ATP Tour players, calling for a reevaluated tour schedule featuring fewer hard court tournaments. This "longevity" narrative has proven inaccurate, and pundits today admire his resilience.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal has had three coaches during his career. Toni Nadal, his uncle, coached him from 1990 to 2017. He is currently coached by Francisco Roig (2005–) and Carlos Moyá (2016–).


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In an interview in CBS's "60 Minutes" in May 2021, Nadal said he has never broken a racket with anger in a match. He added that his family does not approve of it and breaking a racket means he is not in control of his emotions.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal is known for a host of on court rituals including specific bodily movements and the positioning of items courtside. Nadal himself has rejected that such rituals stem from an obsessive–compulsive disorder complex or are based on superstition. Nadal's extensive time taken between points has received criticism from other players including Roger Federer and Denis Shapovalov.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal has been sponsored by Kia Motors since 2006. He has appeared in advertising campaigns for Kia as a global ambassador for the company. In May 2008, Kia released a claymation viral ad featuring Nadal in a tennis match with an alien. In May 2015, Nadal extended his partnership with Kia for another five years.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nike serves as Nadal's clothing and shoe sponsor. Nadal's signature on-court attire entailed a variety of sleeveless shirts paired with 3/4 length capri pants. For the 2009 season, Nadal adopted more-traditional on-court apparel. Nike encouraged Nadal to update his look in order to reflect his new status as the sport's top player at that time and associate Nadal with a style that, while less distinctive than his "pirate" look, would be more widely emulated by consumers. At warmup tournaments in Abu Dhabi and Doha, Nadal played matches in a polo shirt specifically designed for him by Nike, paired with shorts cut above the knee. Nadal's new, more conventional style carried over to the 2009 Australian Open, where he was outfitted with Nike's Bold Crew Men's Tee and Nadal Long Check Shorts. Nadal wears Nike's Air CourtBallistec 2.3 tennis shoes, bearing various customizations throughout the season, including his nickname "Rafa" on the right shoe and a stylized bull logo on the left.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: He became the face of Lanvin's "L'Homme Sport" cologne in April 2009. Nadal uses an AeroPro Drive racquet with a -inch L2 grip. , Nadal's racquets are painted to resemble the new Babolat AeroPro Drive with Cortex GT racquet in order to market a current model which Babolat sells. Nadal uses no replacement grip, and instead wraps two overgrips around the handle. He used Duralast 15L strings until the 2010 season, when he switched to Babolat's new, black-colored, RPM Blast string. Nadal's rackets are always strung at , regardless of which surface or conditions he is playing on.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: , Nadal is the international ambassador for Quely, a company from his native Mallorca that manufactures biscuits, bakery and chocolate-coated products; he has consumed their products ever since he was a young child.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In 2010, luxury watchmaker Richard Mille announced that he had developed an ultra-light wristwatch in collaboration with Nadal called the Richard Mille RM027 Tourbillon watch. The watch is made of titanium and lithium and is valued at US$525,000; Nadal was involved in the design and testing of the watch on the tennis court. During the 2010 French Open, Men's Fitness reported that Nadal wore the Richard Mille watch on the court as part of a sponsorship deal with the Swiss watchmaker.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal replaced Cristiano Ronaldo as the new face of Emporio Armani Underwear and Armani Jeans for the spring/summer 2011 collection. This was the first time that the label has chosen a tennis player for the job; association football has ruled lately prior to Ronaldo, David Beckham graced the ads since 2008. Armani said that he selected Nadal as his latest male underwear model because "...he is ideal as he represents a healthy and positive model for youngsters".


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In June 2012, Nadal joined the group of sports endorsers of the PokerStars online poker cardroom. Nadal won a charity poker tournament against retired Brazilian football player Ronaldo in 2014.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In April 2017, the centre court of the Barcelona Open was named Pista Rafa Nadal. In 2021, prior to the start of tournament, the French Open paid tribute to Nadal with the installation of a 3-meters tall steel statue at Stade Roland Garros. It was created by Jordi Díez Fernández, one of Spain's most renowned sculptors.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal's autobiography, "Rafa" (Hyperion, 2012, ), written with assistance from John Carlin, was published in August 2011. In February 2010, Rafael Nadal was featured in the music video of Shakira's "Gypsy". and part of her album release "She Wolf". In explaining why she chose Nadal for the video, Shakira was quoted as saying in an interview with the "Latin American Herald Tribune": "I thought that maybe I needed someone I could in some way identify with. And Rafael Nadal is a person who has been totally committed to his career since he was very young. Since he was 17, I believe."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: 128036 Rafaelnadal is a main belt asteroid discovered in 2003 at the Observatorio Astronómico de Mallorca and named after Nadal. The decision to name the asteroid after Nadal was made by the International Astronomical Union in response to a request by the observatory. The asteroid is four kilometers in diameter and travels through space at a speed of 20 km per second.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal owns and trains at the Rafa Nadal Sports Centre () in his hometown of Manacor, Mallorca. The centre houses the Rafa Nadal Tennis Academy, where the American International School of Mallorca is located. Also located in the centre is a sports residence, a Rafael Nadal museum, a health clinic, a fitness centre with spa and a café. The facility has 26 tennis courts among its sporting areas.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal also owns and operates three other similar Rafa Nadal Academy/Centre facilities in Al Zahra, Kuwait (called the Rafa Nadal Academy Kuwait), Cancún, Mexico (called the Rafa Nadal Tennis Centre Mexico), and Chalkidiki, Greece (called the Rafa Nadal Tennis Centre Greece). The Mexico and Greece Centres started operations in 2019 while the Kuwait Academy opened in 2020.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal took part in Thailand's "A Million Trees for the King" project, planting a tree in honour of King Bhumibol Adulyadej on a visit to Hua Hin during his Thailand Open 2010. "For me it's an honour to be part of this project", said Nadal. "It's a very good project. I want to congratulate the Thai people and congratulate the King for this unbelievable day. I wish all the best for this idea. It's very, very nice."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: The creation of the Fundación Rafa Nadal took place in November 2007, and its official presentation was in February 2008, at the Manacor Tennis Club in Mallorca, Spain. The foundation will focus on social work and development aid particularly on childhood and youth. On deciding why to start a foundation, Nadal said "This can be the beginning of my future, when I retire and have more time, [...] I am doing very well and I owe society, [...] A month-and-a-half ago I was in Chennai, in India. The truth is we live great here...I can contribute something with my image..." Nadal was inspired by the Red Cross benefit match against malaria with Real Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas, recalling, "We raised an amount of money that we would never have imagined. I have to thank Iker, my project partner, who went all out for it, [...] That is why the time has come to set up my own foundation and determine the destination of the money."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal's mother, Ana María Parera, chairs the charitable organization and father Sebastian is vice-chairman. Coach and uncle Toni Nadal and his agent, former tennis player Carlos Costa, are also involved. Roger Federer has given Nadal advice on getting involved in philanthropy. Despite the fact that poverty in India struck him particularly hard, Nadal wants to start by helping "people close by, in the Balearic Islands, in Spain, and then, if possible, abroad".


title: Rafael Nadal

text: On 16 October 2010, Nadal traveled to India for the first time to visit his tennis academy for underprivileged children at Anantapur Sports Village, in the Anantapur City, Andhra Pradesh. His foundation has also worked in the Anantapur Educational Center project, in collaboration with the Vicente Ferrer Foundation.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Rafael Nadal opened his tennis academy centre to Majorca flood victims in October 2018. By that time he was recovering at home in Majorca, shortly after having to leave the US Open due to injury and one day after the flood he worked personally with some friends to help the victims.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Later, Nadal donated €1 million for rebuilding Sant Llorenç des Cardassar, the most affected town by the floods in the island. Nadal also organized other charitable activities to help repair the damage of the disaster, such as the Olazábal & Nadal charity golf tournament and a charity tennis match in which he was going to participate and that had to be suspended because he had to have an operation on an ankle injury, later identified as Mueller-Weiss Syndrome.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal supports or has supported other charities, such as City Harvest, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Laureus Sport for Good Foundation and Small Steps Project.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal is an avid fan of association football club Real Madrid. On 8 July 2010, it was reported that he had become a shareholder of RCD Mallorca, his local club by birth, in an attempt to assist the club from debt. Nadal reportedly owns 10 percent and was offered the role of vice president, which he rejected. His uncle Miguel Ángel Nadal became assistant coach under Michael Laudrup. Nadal remains a passionate Real Madrid supporter; "ESPN.com" writer Graham Hunter wrote, "He's as "Merengue" as [Real Madrid icons] Raúl, Iker Casillas and Alfredo Di Stéfano."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Shortly after acquiring his interest in Mallorca, Nadal called out UEFA for apparent hypocrisy in ejecting the club from the 2010–11 UEFA Europa League for excessive debts, saying through a club spokesperson, "Well, if those are the criteria upon which UEFA is operating, then European competition will only comprise two or three clubs because all the rest are in debt, too."


title: Rafael Nadal

text: He is a fervent supporter of the Spanish national team, and he was one of six people not affiliated with the team or the national federation allowed to enter the team's locker room following Spain's victory in the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Nadal lived with his parents and younger sister María Isabel in a five-storey apartment building in their hometown of Manacor, Mallorca. In June 2009, Spanish newspaper "La Vanguardia", and then "The New York Times", reported that his parents, Ana María and Sebastián, had separated. This news came after weeks of speculation in Internet posts and message boards over Nadal's personal issues as the cause of his setback. Nadal has been in a relationship with María Francisca (Mery) Perelló Pascual (often mistakenly referred to as Xisca in the press) since 2005, and their engagement was reported in January 2019. The couple married in October 2019. On 8 October 2022, they welcomed their first child, a son named Rafael.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In addition to tennis and football, Nadal enjoys playing golf and poker. In April 2014, he played the world's No. 1 female poker player, Vanessa Selbst, in a poker game in Monaco. In October 2020, Nadal competed in the professional-level Balearic Golf Championship, obtaining a World Amateur Golf Ranking in the process.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: As a young boy, he would run home from school to watch Goku in his favorite Japanese anime, "Dragon Ball". CNN released an article about Nadal's childhood inspiration, and called him "the Dragon Ball of tennis" owing to his unorthodox style "from another planet".


title: Rafael Nadal

text: Despite playing tennis left-handed, Nadal is known for being right-handed while doing things in everyday life such as writing and playing golf.


title: Rafael Nadal

text: In 2021, Nadal announced that he had a rare chronic disorder of his left ankle, Mueller-Weiss syndrome. He was diagnosed at the age of 19 and held off surgery as long as he could. After surgery in 2021, he returned to tennis in early 2022, winning the Australian Open. He later received two numbing injections and anti-inflammatories before each of his seven matches en route to winning the 2022 French Open. Nadal stated that he is not willing to do this again. In an open statement regarding his injury, he said, "I am not injured, I am a player living with an injury."


title: Liam Neeson

text: William John Neeson (born 7 June 1952) is an actor from Northern Ireland. He has received several accolades, including nominations for an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Tony Awards. In 2020, he was placed 7th on "The Irish Times" list of Ireland's 50 Greatest Film Actors. Neeson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2000.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 1976, Neeson joined the Lyric Players' Theatre in Belfast for two years. He then acted in the Arthurian film "Excalibur" (1981). He appeared in supporting roles in "The Bounty" (1984), "The Mission" (1986), and "Husbands and Wives" (1992). He rose to prominence after his leading performance as Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's holocaust drama "Schindler's List" (1993). He continued to star in dramas such as "Nell" (1994), "Rob Roy" (1995), "Michael Collins" (1996), and "Les Misérables" (1998). In 1999 he took the role of Qui-Gon Jinn in George Lucas' space opera "" (1999). He then started to balance his work between critically acclaimed dramas and blockbuster work in franchises. He portrayed Ra's al Ghul in "Batman Begins" (2005) and Aslan in "The Chronicles of Narnia" trilogy (2005–2010). During this time he also appeared in Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" (2002), the romantic comedy "Love Actually" (2003), and the biographical drama "Kinsey" (2004).


title: Liam Neeson

text: Since 2009, Neeson cemented himself as an action star with the action thriller series "Taken" (2008–2014), "The A-Team" (2010), "Unknown" (2011), "The Grey" (2011), "Wrath of the Titans" (2012), "Non-Stop" (2013), "A Walk Among the Tombstones" (2014), and "The Commuter" (2018). He has also starred in Martin Scorsese's religious epic "Silence" (2016), the fantasy drama "A Monster Calls" (2016), Steve McQueen's heist drama "Widows" (2018), the Coen brothers' western "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (2018), and the romantic drama "Ordinary Love" (2019).


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson is also known for his work on stage. He made his Broadway debut in 1993 with his performance in Matt Burke in the revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie" earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. He then starred as Oscar Wilde in David Hare's "The Judas Kiss" in 1998. He received his second Tony Award nomination for his performance in the 2002 Broadway revival of "Arthur Miller's "The Crucible".


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, the son of cook Katherine "Kitty" Neeson (née Brown) and primary school caretaker Bernard "Barney" Neeson. Raised Catholic, he was named Liam after a local priest. The third of four siblings, he has three sisters, Elizabeth, Bernadette, and Rosaleen. He attended St Patrick's College, Ballymena from 1963 to 1967, and later recalled that his love of drama began there.


title: Liam Neeson

text: He said that growing up as a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant town made him cautious, and once said he felt like a "second-class citizen" there, but has also said he was never made to feel "inferior or even different" at the town's predominantly Protestant technical college. "It would be colourful to imagine I had a rebellious, uproarious Irish background," he has said, "but the facts were much greyer. Irish, yes. But all that nationalistic stuff, crying into your Guinness and singing rebel songs—that was never my scene." He has described himself as "out of touch" with the politics and history of Northern Ireland until becoming aware of protests by fellow students after Bloody Sunday, a massacre in Derry in 1972 during the Troubles, which encouraged him to learn more local history. In a 2009 interview, he said, "I never stop thinking about [the Troubles]. I've known guys and girls who have been perpetrators of violence and victims. Protestants and Catholics. It's part of my DNA."


title: Liam Neeson

text: At age nine, Neeson began boxing lessons at the All Saints Youth Club, and went on to win a number of regional titles before discontinuing at 17. He acted in school productions during his teens. His interest in acting and decision to become an actor were also influenced by Ian Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), into whose Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster he sneaked. He said, "[Paisley] had a magnificent presence and it was incredible to watch him just Bible-thumping away... it was acting, but it was also great acting and stirring too." In 1971, he joined a physics and computer science course at Queen's University Belfast before leaving to work for the Guinness Brewery. At Queen's, he discovered a talent for football and was spotted by Seán Thomas at Bohemian FC. There was a club trial in Dublin and Neeson played one game as a substitute against Shamrock Rovers FC, but was not offered a contract.


title: Liam Neeson

text: After leaving university, Neeson returned to Ballymena, where he worked in a variety of casual jobs, such as a forklift operator at Guinness and a lorry driver. He also attended teacher training college for two years in Newcastle upon Tyne before again returning to his hometown. In 1976, he joined the Lyric Players' Theatre in Belfast, where he performed for two years. He got his first film experience in 1977, playing Jesus Christ and The Evangelist in the religious film "Pilgrim's Progress" (1978). He moved to Dublin in 1978 when he was offered a part in Ron Hutchinson's "Says I, Says He", a drama about The Troubles, at the Project Arts Centre. He acted in several other Project productions and joined the Abbey Theatre (the National Theatre of Ireland). In 1980, he performed with Stephen Rea, Ray McAnally and Mick Lally, playing Doalty in Brian Friel's play "Translations", the first production of Friel's and Rea's Field Day Theatre Company, first presented in the Guildhall in Derry on 23 September 1980.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 1980, filmmaker John Boorman saw him on stage as Lennie Small in "Of Mice and Men" and offered him the role of Sir Gawain in the Arthurian film "Excalibur". After the role, Neeson moved to London, where he continued working on stage, and in small budget films and television. He lived with actress Helen Mirren, whom he met working on "Excalibur". Between 1982 and 1987, he starred in five films, most notably with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins in 1984's "The Bounty" and Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in 1986's "The Mission". Neeson guest-starred in the third season of the television series "Miami Vice" in 1986, and moved to Hollywood the next year to take higher-profile roles. He starred with Cher and Dennis Quaid in "Suspect", which brought him critical acclaim. In 1988, he starred with Clint Eastwood in the fifth Dirty Harry film, "The Dead Pool", as Peter Swan, a horror film director. In 1990, he had a starring role in Sam Raimi's "Darkman". Although the film was successful, Neeson's subsequent years did not bring him the same recognition. In 1993, he joined "Ellis Island" co-star and future wife Natasha Richardson in the Broadway play "Anna Christie". They also worked together in "Nell", released the following year.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Steven Spielberg offered Neeson the role of Oskar Schindler in his holocaust film "Schindler's List" after seeing him in "Anna Christie" on Broadway. Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson and Warren Beatty all expressed interest in the part (Beatty even auditioned), but Neeson was cast in December 1992 after auditioning for the role. He read the Keneally book and concluded that his character "enjoyed fookin' with the Nazis. In Keneally's book, it says he was regarded as a kind of a buffoon by them... if the Nazis were New Yorkers, he was from Arkansas. They don't quite take him seriously, and he used that to full effect." His critically acclaimed performance earned him a nomination for a Best Actor Oscar, and helped the film earn Best Picture of 1993. He also received BAFTA and Golden Globes nominations for the performance. He soon became an in-demand leading actor. He starred in the subsequent period pieces "Rob Roy" (1995) and "Michael Collins" (1996), the latter earning him Best Starring Role at the Venice Film Festival and another Golden Globe nomination. He starred as Jean Valjean in the 1998 adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables", and in "The Haunting" (1999) as Dr. David Marrow.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 1999, Neeson starred as Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn in "". Director George Lucas cast Neeson because he considered him a "master actor, who the other actors will look up to, who has got the qualities of strength that the character demands." As the first "Star Wars" film to be released in 16 years, it was surrounded by media anticipation. Neeson's connection to "Star Wars" started in the Crown Bar, Belfast. He told Ricki Lake, "I probably wouldn't have taken the role if it wasn't for the advice of Peter King in the Crown during a Lyric reunion." Despite mixed reviews from critics and fans, "The Phantom Menace" was an enormous box-office success and remained the most financially successful "Star Wars" film (unadjusted for inflation) until "" (2015). Neeson's performance as Qui-Gon received positive reviews and a Saturn Award nomination. A stock recording of his voice from "The Phantom Menace" can be heard during a scene in "" (2002). Neeson was later reported to be appearing in "" (2005), but ultimately did not. In the animated television series "" (2008–20), he voiced Qui-Gon in two episodes of the third season and one episode of the sixth season, and he also made a voice cameo as Qui-Gon in "" (2019). Neeson appeared as Qui-Gon in the final episode of "Obi-Wan Kenobi" (2022), appearing as a force ghost to Obi-Wan, in an uncredited cameo, marking his first live-action portrayal of Qui-Gon since "The Phantom Menace." He later voiced Qui-Gon again for an episode of the animated "Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi" (2022).


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson narrated the 2001 documentaries "Journey into Amazing Caves", a short film about two scientists who travel around the world to search for material for potential cures; and "The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Adventure". The latter won awards at a number of film festivals including Best Documentary from both the Chicago Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review. After being nominated for a Tony Award for his role opposite Laura Linney in "The Crucible", Neeson appeared with Harrison Ford in Kathryn Bigelow's 2002 submarine thriller "" as Captain Mikhail Polenin. He was also on the cast of Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" with Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendan Gleeson, Cameron Diaz and Daniel Day-Lewis, and played a recently widowed writer in Richard Curtis's ensemble comedy "Love Actually" (2003). His role as Alfred Kinsey in "Kinsey" again put Neeson up for nomination for a Golden Globe Award, but he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for "The Aviator".


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2004, Neeson hosted an episode of the NBC sketch show "Saturday Night Live". He starred as a redneck trucker, Marlon Weaver, in an "Appalachian Emergency Room" sketch and as a hippie in a one-off sketch about two stoners (the other played by Amy Poehler) who attempt to borrow a police dog to find their lost stash of marijuana. Despite vowing not to play any Irish stereotypes, Neeson did play a stereotypically Irish man named Lorcan McArdle in the home makeover show parody "You Call This A House, Do Ya?"


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2005, Neeson played Godfrey of Ibelin in Ridley Scott's epic adventure "Kingdom of Heaven"; Ra's al Ghul, one of the main villains in "Batman Begins"; and Father Bernard in Neil Jordan's adaptation of Patrick McCabe's novel "Breakfast on Pluto". In "The Simpsons" episode "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star" (2005), he voiced the kindly priest who (briefly) converts Bart and Homer to Catholicism. That same year, he gave his voice to the lion Aslan in the blockbuster fantasy film "". In 2007, he starred in the American Civil War epic "Seraphim Falls".


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson voiced the main character's father, James, in the video game "Fallout 3". Executive producer Todd Howard said, "This role was written with Liam in mind, and provides the dramatic tone for the entire game". "Fallout 3", the third game in the Fallout series, was extremely well received by critics and shipped 4.7 million copies by the end of 2008, the year it was released.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In the director's commentary of the 2007 "Transformers" DVD, Michael Bay said he had told the animators to seek inspiration from Neeson in creating Optimus Prime's body language. Neeson appeared as Alistair Little in the BBC Northern Ireland/Big Fish Films television drama "Five Minutes of Heaven", which tells the true story of a young Protestant man convicted of murdering a Catholic boy during The Troubles.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2008, Neeson starred in the action film "Taken", a French-produced film also starring Famke Janssen and Maggie Grace, based on a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and directed by Pierre Morel. Neeson plays a retired CIA operative from the elite Special Activities Division who sets about tracking down his teenage daughter after she is kidnapped. "Taken" was a worldwide box-office hit, grossing $223.9 million worldwide, making almost $200 million more than its production budget. Neeson has said in interviews that he believed that "Taken" had put some people off the idea of actually travelling to Europe. "Taken" brought Neeson back into the centre of the public eye and resulted in his being cast in many more big-budget Hollywood movies. That year he also narrated the documentary "Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity" and again lent his voice to Aslan in "" (2008). He also provided a voice for Hayao Miyazaki's anime film "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea", which received an August 2009 release.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2010, Neeson played Zeus in the remake of the 1981 film, "Clash of the Titans". The film was a huge box-office hit, grossing $475 million worldwide. Neeson also starred in Atom Egoyan's erotic thriller "Chloe", theatrically released by Sony Pictures Classics on 26 March 2010. "Chloe" had enjoyed commercial success and became the Canadian director's biggest money maker ever. Later the same year, he played John "Hannibal" Smith in the spin-off movie from the television series "The A-Team". Neeson voiced Aslan once more in the sequel " (2010)".


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2011, Neeson starred in the action-thriller "Unknown", a German-British-American co-production of a French book filmed in Berlin in early 2010, and directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. This film led to a collaboration between Neeson and Collet-Serra on a series of similar action films including "Non-Stop" (2014), "Run All Night" (2015) and "The Commuter" (2018).


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson reunited with Steven Spielberg with plans to star as Abraham Lincoln in the 2012 film "Lincoln", based on the book "" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. In preparation for the role, Neeson visited the District of Columbia and Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln lived before being elected, and read Lincoln's personal letters. Neeson eventually declined the role, claiming he was "past his sell date" and had grown too old to play Lincoln. He was replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis (who in turn would win his third Academy Award for Best Actor).


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2010, Neeson made a guest-star appearance on the Showtime series "The Big C". In 2011, he played himself in BBC2's series "Life's Too Short". In late 2011, Neeson was cast to play the lead character, a journalist, in a new album recording and arena production of "Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds". He replaced Richard Burton, who had posthumously appeared in the arena production through CGI animation. Neeson did not physically appear on the stage, instead playing the role through the use of 3D holography. In 2012, Neeson starred in Joe Carnahan's "The Grey". The film received mostly positive reviews and Neeson's performance received critical acclaim. He also starred in "Taken 2", a successful sequel to his 2008 blockbuster. That year, he once again played Ra's al Ghul in "The Dark Knight Rises", the third and final film in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight Trilogy". He narrated the first trailer for the film.


title: Liam Neeson

text: On 31 January 2014, it was reported that Neeson would work with director Martin Scorsese again in an adaptation of the novel "Silence". Neeson had a supporting role as the henchman Bad Cop/Good Cop in the animated film "The Lego Movie", which was a critical and commercial success. Neeson later played Bill Marks in the 2014 action film Non-Stop. The film was released on 28 February 2014. He also appeared, uncredited, as God in the BBC2 series "Rev.". Neeson stars in the 2014 film "A Walk Among the Tombstones", an adaption of the best-selling novel of the same name, in which he plays former cop Matthew Scudder, a detective hired to hunt the killers of a drug dealer's wife.


title: Liam Neeson

text: During Super Bowl XLIX, Supercell did a "Clash of Clans" commercial with Neeson playing the game as "AngryNeeson52" and vowing revenge on his opponent "BigBuffetBoy85" while waiting for his scone at a bakery. The appearance was a parody of his role in "Taken". In 2016, Neeson narrated the RTÉ One three-part documentary on the Easter Rising, "1916". In 2016, he did the voice and motion capture for the Monster in the Spanish film "A Monster Calls".


title: Liam Neeson

text: Following the success of the "Taken" films, Neeson has become increasingly known as a star of action thriller films. Besides his aforementioned action-thrillers made in collaboration with Collet-Serra, other recent action films starring Neeson have included "The Grey", "A Walk Among the Tombstones", "Cold Pursuit", "Honest Thief", "The Marksman", "The Ice Road" and "Blacklight". Neeson has indicated a desire to retire from the action genre though the films have taken his acting career in a new direction.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson opposes what he sees as the unrestricted right to own firearms in the U.S. and has made calls for gun control. In January 2015, he repeated his views, calling U.S. gun laws a "disgrace" in an interview with Emirati newspaper "Gulf News" when replying to a question about the "Charlie Hebdo" shootings earlier that month. In response, U.S gun manufacturer Para USA, which provided the prop weapons used by Neeson in the "Taken" film series, stated: "We will no longer provide firearms for use in films starring Liam Neeson and ask that our friends and partners in Hollywood refrain from associating our brand and products with his projects."


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2014, Neeson protested against the anti-carriage horse campaign of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who said he would outlaw horse-drawn carriages in Central Park once he took office. He wrote an opinion page published in "The New York Times" citing the carriage trade as a safe one for employees, horses, and tourists, and noted it was a livelihood for many immigrants.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson narrated a video for Amnesty International in favour of the legalisation of abortion in Ireland, which some conservative and pro-life commentators claimed was "anti-Catholic".


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson was opposed to Brexit, stating in 2016 that it would be truly "a shame to sacrifice all the progress that has been made by the peace process regarding border controls".


title: Liam Neeson

text: In September 2017, Neeson compared the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump to the Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon: "Democracy works and no man—and certainly not the president—is above the law. He has to be accountable."


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson lived with actress Helen Mirren during the early 1980s. They met while working on "Excalibur" (1981). Interviewed by James Lipton for "Inside the Actors Studio", Neeson said Mirren was instrumental in his getting an agent.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson then met actress Natasha Richardson while performing in a revival of the play "Anna Christie" on Broadway in 1993. They were married on 3 July 1994 and had two sons together, Micheál (born in 1995) and Daniel (born in 1996). In October 1998, they won £50,000 ($85,370) in libel damages after the "Daily Mirror" wrongly claimed that their marriage was suffering. They donated the money to victims of the August 1998 Omagh bombing. In August 2004, they purchased an estate in Millbrook, New York. On 18 March 2009, Richardson died when she suffered a severe head injury in a skiing accident at the Mont Tremblant Resort, northwest of Montreal. Neeson donated her organs following her death.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson holds Irish, British, and American citizenship, having been naturalised as an American citizen in 2009. He primarily identifies as Irish. After taking up American citizenship, he was adamant he was not turning his back on his Irish roots. In 2009, nearly four decades after he was an undergraduate in physics and computer science at Queen's University, Belfast, it awarded him an honorary doctorate, presented to him in New York by Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter Gregson. In March 2011, he was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. He is a patron of Belfast-based charity and film festival CineMagic, which helps young people get involved in the movie industry.


title: Liam Neeson

text: A heavy smoker earlier in his career, Neeson quit smoking in 2003 while working on "Love Actually". When he took the role of Hannibal for the 2010 film adaptation of "The A-Team", he had reservations about smoking cigars (a signature trait of the character), but agreed to do it for the film.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In June 2012, Neeson's publicist denied reports that Neeson was converting to Islam. Neeson has expressed an affection for the "adhan", the Islamic call to prayer, that he grew accustomed to while filming "Taken 2" in Istanbul: "By the third week, it was like I couldn't live without it. It really became hypnotic and very moving for me in a very special way. Very beautiful." He also expressed admiration for the "Spiritual Exercises" of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson's mother, Kitty, died in June 2020. He was unable to return to his hometown for her funeral due to travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson was criticised for his comments on Ireland's "Late Late Show" in January 2018, during which he described the Me Too movement as a "witch hunt" and cited Garrison Keillor's dismissal from Minnesota Public Radio as an example.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In February 2019, Neeson gained public and media controversy after a press junket interview he conducted with "The Independent" while promoting "Cold Pursuit", a film about a father seeking revenge for his son's murder. He said that he generated his character's "primal" anger by recounting an experience he had 40 years ago, in which a female friend of his had been raped by a stranger. After learning the attacker was a black man, Neeson said that he spent a week going "up and down areas with a cosh, hoping some 'black bastard' would come out of a pub and have a go" so that he "could kill him". In the interview, he also said he was ashamed of the experience and that the things he did and said were "horrible". He said, "It's awful [...] but I did learn a lesson from it, when I eventually thought, 'What the fuck are you doing?'"


title: Liam Neeson

text: In an appearance on "Good Morning America", Neeson elaborated on his comments while denying being a racist, stating that he asked for physical attributes of the rapist other than his race and that he would have done the same if the rapist was "a Scot or a Brit or a Lithuanian". He also said that he had purposely gone into "black areas of the city" but that he "did seek help" and counselling from his friends and a priest after coming to his senses. He said that the lesson of his experience was "to open up [and] to talk about these things", including toxic masculinity and the underlying "racism and bigotry" in both the U.S. and Northern Ireland. The controversy following his comments led to cancellation of the red carpet event for the premiere of "Cold Pursuit". Neeson was publicly defended by Michelle Rodriguez, Whoopi Goldberg, John Barnes and Ralph Fiennes. He later appeared in the "Atlanta" episode “New Jazz” as a fictionalised version of himself, to examine the controversy.


title: Liam Neeson

text: In 2000, Neeson was offered the "Freedom of the Town of Ballymena" by the Ballymena Borough Council, but because of objections made by members of the Democratic Unionist Party regarding his comments that he had felt like a "second-class citizen" growing up as a Catholic in the town, he declined the award, citing tensions. Following the controversy, Neeson wrote a letter to the council, stating; "I will always remain very proud of my upbringing in, and association with, the town and my country of birth, which I will continue to promote at every opportunity. Indeed, I regard the enduring support over the years from all sections of the community in Ballymena as being more than sufficient recognition for any success which I may have achieved as an actor." Subsequently, on 28 January 2013, Neeson received the Freedom of the Borough from Ballymena Borough Council at a ceremony in the town.


title: Liam Neeson

text: Neeson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in her 2000 New Year Honours. The American Ireland Fund honoured Neeson with their Performing Arts Award for the great distinction he has brought to Ireland at their 2008 Dinner Gala in New York City. In 2009, at a ceremony in New York, Neeson was awarded an honorary doctorate by Queen's University, Belfast. On 9 April 2016, he was honoured with the Outstanding Contribution to Cinema Award by the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) at the Mansion House, Dublin, with Irish President Michael D. Higgins presenting the award. In 2017, Neeson was listed by UK-based company Richtopia at number 74 in the list of 200 Most Influential Philanthropists and Social Entrepreneurs Worldwide. In January 2018, he was awarded the Distinguished Service for the Irish Abroad Award by Irish President Michael D. Higgins, who described it as an award "for Irish people abroad who are making a contribution to humanity".


title: Greek alphabet

text: The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BCE, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.


title: Greek alphabet

text: The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BCE and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.


title: Greek alphabet

text: In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic. For a number of letters, sound values differ considerably between Ancient and Modern Greek, because their pronunciation has followed a set of systematic phonological shifts that affected the language in its post-classical stages.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants () and aspirated plosives () in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. The correspondences are as follows:


title: Greek alphabet

text: Among the vowel symbols, Modern Greek sound values reflect the radical simplification of the vowel system of post-classical Greek, merging multiple formerly distinct vowel phonemes into a much smaller number. This leads to several groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the historical spellings in most of these cases. As a consequence, the spellings of words in Modern Greek are often not predictable from the pronunciation alone, while the reverse mapping, from spelling to pronunciation, is usually regular and predictable.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern symbol–sound mappings in reading Greek of all historical stages. In other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components. Among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the four mentioned above (), there is also , and , pronounced . The Ancient Greek diphthongs , and are pronounced , and in Modern Greek. In some environments, they are devoiced to , and respectively. The Modern Greek consonant combinations and stand for and (or and ) respectively; stands for and stands for . In addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter , before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal ; thus and are pronounced like English . In analogy to and , is also used to stand for . There are also the combinations and .


title: Greek alphabet

text: In the polytonic orthography traditionally used for ancient Greek, the stressed vowel of each word carries one of three accent marks: either the acute accent (), the grave accent (), or the circumflex accent ( or ). These signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. By the time their use became conventional and obligatory in Greek writing, in late antiquity, pitch accent was evolving into a single stress accent, and thus the three signs have not corresponded to a phonological distinction in actual speech ever since. In addition to the accent marks, every word-initial vowel must carry either of two so-called "breathing marks": the rough breathing (), marking an sound at the beginning of a word, or the smooth breathing (), marking its absence. The letter rho (ρ), although not a vowel, also carries rough breathing in a word-initial position. If a rho was geminated within a word, the first always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing (ῤῥ) leading to the transliteration rrh.


title: Greek alphabet

text: The vowel letters carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the so-called iota subscript, which has the shape of a small vertical stroke or a miniature below the letter. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, (i.e. ), which became monophthongized during antiquity.


title: Greek alphabet

text: This system of diacritics was first developed by the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium ( 257 –  185/180 BC), who worked at the Musaeum in Alexandria during the third century BC. Aristophanes of Byzantium also was the first to divide poems into lines, rather than writing them like prose, and also introduced a series of signs for textual criticism. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as "monotonic", was adopted for official use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. It uses only a single accent mark, the acute (also known in this context as "tonos", i.e. simply "accent"), marking the stressed syllable of polysyllabic words, and occasionally the diaeresis to distinguish diphthongal from digraph readings in pairs of vowel letters, making this monotonic system very similar to the accent mark system used in Spanish. The polytonic system is still conventionally used for writing Ancient Greek, while in some book printing and generally in the usage of conservative writers it can still also be found in use for Modern Greek.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a similar function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ("ó,ti", "whatever") from ("óti", "that").


title: Greek alphabet

text: There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script. The form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, is replaced with , the diphthongs and are rendered as and (or ) respectively; and and are simplified to and respectively. Smooth breathing marks are usually ignored and rough breathing marks are usually rendered as the letter . In modern scholarly transliteration of Ancient Greek, will usually be rendered as , and the vowel combinations as respectively. The letters and are generally rendered as and ; as either or ; and word-initial as .


title: Greek alphabet

text: Multiple different transcription conventions exist for Modern Greek. These differ widely, depending on their purpose, on how close they stay to the conventional letter correspondences of Ancient Greek-based transcription systems, and to what degree they attempt either an exact letter-by-letter transliteration or rather a phonetically-based transcription. Standardized formal transcription systems have been defined by the International Organization for Standardization (as ISO 843), by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, by the Library of Congress, and others.


title: Greek alphabet

text: During the Mycenaean period, from around the sixteenth century to the twelfth century BC, Linear B was used to write the earliest attested form of the Greek language, known as Mycenaean Greek. This writing system, unrelated to the Greek alphabet, last appeared in the thirteenth century BC. In the late ninth century BC or early eighth century BC, the Greek alphabet emerged. The period between the use of the two writing systems, during which no Greek texts are attested, is known as the Greek Dark Ages. The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, one of the closely related scripts used for the West Semitic languages, calling it Φοινικήια γράμματα 'Phoenician letters'. However, the Phoenician alphabet is limited to consonants. When it was adopted for writing Greek, certain consonants were adapted to express vowels. The use of both vowels and consonants makes Greek the first alphabet in the narrow sense, as distinguished from the abjads used in Semitic languages, which have letters only for consonants.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek initially took over all of the 22 letters of Phoenician. Five were reassigned to denote vowel sounds: the glide consonants ("yodh") and ("waw") were used for [i] (Ι, "iota") and [u] (Υ, "upsilon") respectively; the glottal stop consonant ("aleph") was used for [a] (Α, "alpha"); the pharyngeal ("ʿayin") was turned into [o] (Ο, "omicron"); and the letter for ("he") was turned into [e] (Ε, "epsilon"). A doublet of waw was also borrowed as a consonant for [w] (Ϝ, digamma). In addition, the Phoenician letter for the emphatic glottal ("heth") was borrowed in two different functions by different dialects of Greek: as a letter for /h/ (Η, heta) by those dialects that had such a sound, and as an additional vowel letter for the long (Η, eta) by those dialects that lacked the consonant. Eventually, a seventh vowel letter for the long (Ω, omega) was introduced.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek also introduced three new consonant letters for its aspirated plosive sounds and consonant clusters: Φ ("phi") for , Χ ("chi") for and Ψ ("psi") for . In western Greek variants, Χ was instead used for and Ψ for . The origin of these letters is a matter of some debate.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Three of the original Phoenician letters dropped out of use before the alphabet took its classical shape: the letter Ϻ ("san"), which had been in competition with Σ ("sigma") denoting the same phoneme /s/; the letter Ϙ ("qoppa"), which was redundant with Κ ("kappa") for /k/, and Ϝ ("digamma"), whose sound value /w/ dropped out of the spoken language before or during the classical period.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek was originally written predominantly from right to left, just like Phoenician, but scribes could freely alternate between directions. For a time, a writing style with alternating right-to-left and left-to-right lines (called "boustrophedon", literally "ox-turning", after the manner of an ox ploughing a field) was common, until in the classical period the left-to-right writing direction became the norm. Individual letter shapes were mirrored depending on the writing direction of the current line.


title: Greek alphabet

text: There were initially numerous local (epichoric) variants of the Greek alphabet, which differed in the use and non-use of the additional vowel and consonant symbols and several other features. Epichoric alphabets are commonly divided into four major types according to their different treatments of additional consonant letters for the aspirated consonants (/pʰ, kʰ/) and consonant clusters (/ks, ps/) of Greek. These four types are often conventionally labelled as "green", "red", "light blue" and "dark blue" types, based on a colour-coded map in a seminal 19th-century work on the topic, "Studien zur Geschichte des griechischen Alphabets" by Adolf Kirchhoff (1867).


title: Greek alphabet

text: The "green" (or southern) type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician. The "red" (or western) type is the one that was later transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet, and bears some crucial features characteristic of that later development. The "blue" (or eastern) type is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged. Athens used a local form of the "light blue" alphabet type until the end of the fifth century BC, which lacked the letters Ξ and Ψ as well as the vowel symbols Η and Ω. In the Old Attic alphabet, stood for and for . was used for all three sounds (correspondinɡ to classical respectively), and was used for all of (corresponding to classical respectively). The letter (heta) was used for the consonant . Some variant local letter forms were also characteristic of Athenian writing, some of which were shared with the neighboring (but otherwise "red") alphabet of Euboia: a form of that resembled a Latin "L" () and a form of that resembled a Latin "S" ().


title: Greek alphabet

text: The classical twenty-four-letter alphabet that is now used to represent the Greek language was originally the local alphabet of Ionia. By the late fifth century BC, it was commonly used by many Athenians. In 403 BC, at the suggestion of the archon Eucleides, the Athenian Assembly formally abandoned the Old Attic alphabet and adopted the Ionian alphabet as part of the democratic reforms after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants. Because of Eucleides's role in suggesting the idea to adopt the Ionian alphabet, the standard twenty-four-letter Greek alphabet is sometimes known as the "Eucleidean alphabet". Roughly thirty years later, the Eucleidean alphabet was adopted in Boeotia and it may have been adopted a few years previously in Macedonia. By the end of the fourth century BC, it had displaced local alphabets across the Greek-speaking world to become the standard form of the Greek alphabet.


title: Greek alphabet

text: When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, they took over not only the letter shapes and sound values but also the names by which the sequence of the alphabet could be recited and memorized. In Phoenician, each letter name was a word that began with the sound represented by that letter; thus "ʾaleph", the word for "ox", was used as the name for the glottal stop , "bet", or "house", for the sound, and so on. When the letters were adopted by the Greeks, most of the Phoenician names were maintained or modified slightly to fit Greek phonology; thus, "ʾaleph, bet, gimel" became "alpha, beta, gamma".


title: Greek alphabet

text: The Greek names of the following letters are more or less straightforward continuations of their Phoenician antecedents. Between Ancient and Modern Greek, they have remained largely unchanged, except that their pronunciation has followed regular sound changes along with other words (for instance, in the name of "beta", ancient /b/ regularly changed to modern /v/, and ancient /ɛː/ to modern /i/, resulting in the modern pronunciation "vita"). The name of lambda is attested in early sources as besides ; in Modern Greek the spelling is often , reflecting pronunciation. Similarly, iota is sometimes spelled in Modern Greek ( is conventionally transcribed word-initially and intervocalically before back vowels and ). In the tables below, the Greek names of all letters are given in their traditional polytonic spelling; in modern practice, like with all other words, they are usually spelled in the simplified monotonic system.


title: Greek alphabet

text: In the cases of the three historical sibilant letters below, the correspondence between Phoenician and Ancient Greek is less clear, with apparent mismatches both in letter names and sound values. The early history of these letters (and the fourth sibilant letter, obsolete san) has been a matter of some debate. Here too, the changes in the pronunciation of the letter names between Ancient and Modern Greek are regular.


title: Greek alphabet

text: In the following group of consonant letters, the older forms of the names in Ancient Greek were spelled with , indicating an original pronunciation with "-ē". In Modern Greek these names are spelled with .


title: Greek alphabet

text: The following group of vowel letters were originally called simply by their sound values as long vowels: ē, ō, ū, and . Their modern names contain adjectival qualifiers that were added during the Byzantine period, to distinguish between letters that had become confusable. Thus, the letters and , pronounced identically by this time, were called "o mikron" ("small o") and "o mega" ("big o") respectively. The letter was called "e psilon" ("plain e") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph , while, similarly, , which at this time was pronounced , was called "y psilon" ("plain y") to distinguish it from the identically pronounced digraph .


title: Greek alphabet

text: Some dialects of the Aegean and Cypriot have retained long consonants and pronounce and ; also, has come to be pronounced in Cypriot.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Like Latin and other alphabetic scripts, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter, without a distinction between uppercase and lowercase. This distinction is an innovation of the modern era, drawing on different lines of development of the letter shapes in earlier handwriting.


title: Greek alphabet

text: The oldest forms of the letters in antiquity are majuscule forms. Besides the upright, straight inscriptional forms (capitals) found in stone carvings or incised pottery, more fluent writing styles adapted for handwriting on soft materials were also developed during antiquity. Such handwriting has been preserved especially from papyrus manuscripts in Egypt since the Hellenistic period. Ancient handwriting developed two distinct styles: uncial writing, with carefully drawn, rounded block letters of about equal size, used as a book hand for carefully produced literary and religious manuscripts, and cursive writing, used for everyday purposes. The cursive forms approached the style of lowercase letter forms, with ascenders and descenders, as well as many connecting lines and ligatures between letters.


title: Greek alphabet

text: In the ninth and tenth century, uncial book hands were replaced with a new, more compact writing style, with letter forms partly adapted from the earlier cursive. This minuscule style remained the dominant form of handwritten Greek into the modern era. During the Renaissance, western printers adopted the minuscule letter forms as lowercase printed typefaces, while modeling uppercase letters on the ancient inscriptional forms. The orthographic practice of using the letter case distinction for marking proper names, titles, etc. developed in parallel to the practice in Latin and other western languages.


title: Greek alphabet

text: The Armenian and Georgian alphabets are almost certainly modeled on the Greek alphabet, but their graphic forms are quite different.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Apart from the daughter alphabets listed above, which were adapted from Greek but developed into separate writing systems, the Greek alphabet has also been adopted at various times and in various places to write other languages. For some of them, additional letters were introduced.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek symbols are used as symbols in mathematics, physics and other sciences. Many symbols have traditional uses, such as lower case epsilon (ε) for an arbitrarily small positive number, lower case pi (π) for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, capital sigma (Σ) for summation, and lower case sigma (σ) for standard deviation. Formerly, the Greek letters were used for naming North Atlantic hurricanes if the normal list ran out. This happened only in the 2005 and 2020 hurricane seasons for a total of 15 storms, the last one being Hurricane Iota. In May 2021 the World Health Organisations announced that the variants of SARS-CoV-2 of the virus would be named using letters of the Greek alphabet to avoid stigma and simplify communications for non-scientific audiences.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek letters are used to denote the brighter stars within each of the eighty-eight constellations. In most constellations, the brightest star is designated Alpha and the next brightest Beta etc. For example, the brightest star in the constellation of Centaurus is known as Alpha Centauri. For historical reasons, the Greek designations of some constellations begin with a lower ranked letter.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Several Greek letters are used as phonetic symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Several of them denote fricative consonants; the rest stand for variants of vowel sounds. The glyph shapes used for these letters in specialized phonetic fonts is sometimes slightly different from the conventional shapes in Greek typography proper, with glyphs typically being more upright and using serifs, to make them conform more with the typographical character of other, Latin-based letters in the phonetic alphabet. Nevertheless, in the Unicode encoding standard, the following three phonetic symbols are considered the same characters as the corresponding Greek letters proper:


title: Greek alphabet

text: On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones.


title: Greek alphabet

text: The symbol in Americanist phonetic notation for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is the Greek letter lambda , but in the IPA. The IPA symbol for the palatal lateral approximant is , which looks similar to lambda, but is actually an inverted lowercase "y".


title: Greek alphabet

text: Greek letters were also used to write numbers. In the classical Ionian system, the first nine letters of the alphabet stood for the numbers from 1 to 9, the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 10, from 10 to 90, and the next nine letters stood for the multiples of 100, from 100 to 900. For this purpose, in addition to the 24 letters which by that time made up the standard alphabet, three otherwise obsolete letters were retained or revived: digamma for 6, koppa for 90, and a rare Ionian letter for [ss], today called sampi , for 900. This system has remained in use in Greek up to the present day, although today it is only employed for limited purposes such as enumerating chapters in a book, similar to the way Roman numerals are used in English. The three extra symbols are today written as , and respectively. To mark a letter as a numeral sign, a small stroke called "keraia" is added to the right of it.


title: Greek alphabet

text: In North America, many college fraternities and sororities are named with combinations of Greek letters, and are hence also known as "Greek letter organizations". This naming tradition was initiated by the foundation of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the College of William and Mary in 1776. The name of this fraternal organization is an acronym for the ancient Greek phrase Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης ("Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs"), which means "Love of wisdom, the guide of life" and serves as the organization's motto. Sometimes early fraternal organizations were known by their Greek letter names because the mottos that these names stood for were secret and revealed only to members of the fraternity.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Different chapters within the same fraternity are almost always (with a handful of exceptions) designated using Greek letters as serial numbers. The founding chapter of each respective organization is its A chapter. As an organization expands, it establishes a B chapter, a Γ chapter, and so on and so forth. In an organization that expands to more than 24 chapters, the chapter after Ω chapter is AA chapter, followed by AB chapter, etc. Each of these is still a "chapter Letter", albeit a double-digit letter just as 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. The Roman alphabet has a similar extended form with such double-digit letters when necessary, but it is used for columns in a table or chart rather than chapters of an organization.


title: Greek alphabet

text: Some letters can occur in variant shapes, mostly inherited from medieval minuscule handwriting. While their use in normal typography of Greek is purely a matter of font styles, some such variants have been given separate encodings in Unicode.


title: Greek alphabet

text: For computer usage, a variety of encodings have been used for Greek online, many of them documented in .


title: Greek alphabet

text: The two principal ones still used today are ISO/IEC 8859-7 and Unicode. ISO 8859-7 supports only the monotonic orthography; Unicode supports both the monotonic and polytonic orthographies.


title: Greek alphabet

text: For the range A0–FF (hex), it follows the Unicode range 370–3CF (see below) except that some symbols, like ©, ½, § etc. are used where Unicode has unused locations. Like all ISO-8859 encodings, it is equal to ASCII for 00–7F (hex).


title: Greek alphabet

text: Unicode supports polytonic orthography well enough for ordinary continuous text in modern and ancient Greek, and even many archaic forms for epigraphy. With the use of combining characters, Unicode also supports Greek philology and dialectology and various other specialized requirements. Most current text rendering engines do not render diacritics well, so, though alpha with macron and acute can be "represented" as U+03B1 U+0304 U+0301, this rarely renders well: .


title: Greek alphabet

text: There are two main blocks of Greek characters in Unicode. The first is "Greek and Coptic" (U+0370 to U+03FF). This block is based on ISO 8859-7 and is sufficient to write Modern Greek. There are also some archaic letters and Greek-based technical symbols.


title: Greek alphabet

text: This block also supports the Coptic alphabet. Formerly, most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF).


title: Greek alphabet

text: To write polytonic Greek, one may use combining diacritical marks or the precomposed characters in the "Greek Extended" block (U+1F00 to U+1FFF).


title: Greek alphabet

text: IBM code pages 437, 860, 861, 862, 863, and 865 contain the letters ΓΘΣΦΩαδεπστφ (plus β as an alternative interpretation for ß).


title: Drake (musician)

text: Aubrey Drake Graham ( ; born October 24, 1986) is a Canadian rapper and singer. An influential figure in contemporary popular music, Drake has been credited for popularizing singing and R&B sensibilities in hip hop. He gained recognition by starring as Jimmy Brooks in the CTV teen drama series "" (2001–08) and subsequently pursued a career in music releasing his debut mixtape "Room for Improvement" in 2006. He released the mixtapes "Comeback Season" (2007) and "So Far Gone" (2009) before signing with Young Money Entertainment.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Drake's first three albums, "Thank Me Later" (2010), "Take Care" (2011) and "Nothing Was the Same" (2013), were all critical successes and propelled him to the forefront of hip hop. His fourth album, "Views" (2016), saw exploration of dancehall and stood atop the "Billboard" 200 for 13 non-consecutive weeks, making it the first album by a male artist to do so in over a decade, and featured the chart record-setting lead single "One Dance". In 2018, Drake released the double album "Scorpion", which contained the "Billboard" Hot 100 number-one singles "God's Plan", "Nice for What", and "In My Feelings". Drake's widely anticipated sixth album, "Certified Lover Boy" (2021), achieved nine top 10 hits on the Hot 100, setting the then-record for most US top-ten hits from one album, with its lead single "Way 2 Sexy" reaching number one. In 2022, Drake released the house-inspired album "Honestly, Nevermind" and the collaborative album, "Her Loss", with 21 Savage. Known for frequent accompanying releases to his albums, Drake achieved critical and commercial success with the mixtapes "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" (2015) and "More Life" (2017).


title: Drake (musician)

text: As an entrepreneur, Drake founded the OVO Sound record label with longtime collaborator 40 in 2012. In 2013, Drake became the "global ambassador" of the Toronto Raptors, joining their executive committee and later obtaining naming rights to their practice facility. In 2016, he began collaborating with Brent Hocking on the bourbon whiskey Virginia Black. Drake heads the OVO fashion label and the Nocta collaboration with Nike, and founded the production company DreamCrew and the fragrance house Better World. In 2018, Drake was reportedly responsible for 5 percent (CAD$440 million) of Toronto's CAD$8.8 billion annual tourism income. In 2022, he became a part owner of Italian football club A.C. Milan.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Among the world's best-selling music artists, with over 170 million records sold, Drake is ranked as the highest-certified digital singles artist in the United States by the RIAA. He has won four Grammy Awards, six American Music Awards, a record 34 "Billboard" Music Awards, two Brit Awards, and three Juno Awards. Drake has achieved 11 number-one hits on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and holds further Hot 100 records; he has the most top 10 singles (67), most charted songs (293), the most simultaneously charted songs in one week (27), the most Hot 100 debuts in one week (22), and the most continuous time on the Hot 100 (431 weeks). He additionally has the most number-one singles on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, Hot Rap Songs, and Rhythmic Airplay charts.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Aubrey Drake Graham was born on October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario. His father, Dennis Graham, is African-American Catholic from Memphis, Tennessee who worked as a drummer, performing alongside country musician Jerry Lee Lewis. His mother, Sandra "Sandi" Graham ( Sher), is a Canadian Ashkenazi Jew, who worked as an English teacher and florist. Graham performed at Club Bluenote in Toronto, where he met Sandra, who was in attendance. Drake is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, the former derived from Graham. In his youth, he attended a Jewish day school, and became a bar mitzvah.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Drake's parents divorced when he was five years old. After the divorce, he and his mother remained in Toronto; his father returned to Memphis, where he was incarcerated for a number of years on drug-related charges. Graham's limited finances and legal issues caused him to remain in the U.S. until Drake's early adulthood. Prior to his arrest, Graham would travel to Toronto and bring Drake to Memphis every summer. His father later collaborated with Canadian music group Arkells on the music video for a song titled "Drake's Dad". Graham claimed in an interview that Drake's assertions of him being an absent father were embellishments used to sell music, which Drake vehemently denies.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Drake was raised in two neighbourhoods. He lived on Weston Road in Toronto's working-class west end until grade six and attended Weston Memorial Junior Public School until grade four, playing minor hockey with the Weston Red Wings. Drake was a promising right winger, reaching the Upper Canada College hockey camp, but left at the behest of his mother following a vicious cross-check to his neck during a game by an opposing player. He then moved to one of the city's affluent neighbourhoods, Forest Hill, in 2000. When asked about the move, Drake replied, "[We had] a half of a house we could live in. The other people had the top half, we had the bottom half. I lived in the basement, my mom lived on the first floor. It was not big, it was not luxurious. It was what we could afford." Demonstrating an affinity for the arts, at age 10, Drake appeared in a comedic sketch which aired during the 1997 NHL Awards, featuring a riff of Martin Brodeur and Ron Hextall and their record as being the only goalies to have scored multiple goals.


title: Drake (musician)

text: He attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute for high school, and then attended Vaughan Road Academy in Toronto's multicultural Oakwood–Vaughan neighbourhood; Drake described Vaughan Road Academy as "not by any means the easiest school to go to." Drake was bullied at school for his racial and religious background, and determining that his class schedule was detrimental to his burgeoning acting career, he dropped out of school. Drake later graduated in October 2012.


title: Drake (musician)

text: At the age of 15, Drake, eager to begin his career as an actor, was introduced to a high school friend's father, an acting agent. The agent found Drake a role on the Canadian teen drama series "". Drake portrayed , a basketball star who became physically disabled after he was shot by a classmate. Drake reportedly disliked this character arc because of its apparent tokenism (his was one of the only black characters in the series), and he also believed it could negatively influence his standing as a rapper. Longtime series writer James Hurst said that Drake threatened legal action to redo the storyline, before ultimately agreeing to it. Madeleine Robinson, the executive director of the Californian non-profit organization Wheelchair 4 Kids, praised the storyline and Drake's performance, noting "he instilled confidence and representation" to disabled youth. When asked about his early acting career, Drake replied, "My mother was very sick. We were very poor, like broke. The only money I had coming in was [from] Canadian TV." He appeared in a total of 100 episodes between 2001 and 2008. In 2010, Drake expressed interest in playing Barack Obama in a biopic, to which Obama responded with approval in an interview in 2020.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Being musically inspired by Jay-Z and Clipse, Drake self-released his debut mixtape, "Room for Improvement", in 2006. The mixtape featured Trey Songz and Lupe Fiasco and included vast production from Boi-1da and Frank Dukes. When asked about the mixtape, Drake described the project as "pretty straightforward, radio friendly, [and] not much content to it." "Room for Improvement" was released for sale only and sold roughly 6,000 copies, for which Drake received $304.04 in royalties. He performed his first concert on August 19, 2006, at the Kool Haus nightclub as an opening act for Ice Cube, performing for half an hour and earning $100. In 2007, Drake released his second mixtape "Comeback Season". Released from his recently founded October's Very Own label, it spawned the single "Replacement Girl" featuring Trey Songz. The song made Drake become the first unsigned Canadian rapper to have his music video on BET, with "Replacement Girl" featured on their "New Joint of the Day" segment in April 2007. The song also saw Drake sample "Man of the Year" by Brisco, Flo Rida and Lil Wayne, retaining Lil Wayne's verse, and adjoined his own to the song's earlier half. This caused Jas Prince to gift Lil Wayne the song, which prompted the rapper to invite Drake to Houston to join his "Tha Carter III" tour. Throughout the duration of the tour, Drake and Lil Wayne recorded multiple songs together, including "Ransom", "Forever", and a remix to "Brand New".


title: Drake (musician)

text: In 2009, Drake released his third mixtape "So Far Gone". It was made available for free download through his OVO blog website, and featured Lil Wayne, Trey Songz, Omarion, Lloyd, and Bun B. It received over 2,000 downloads in the first 2 hours of release, finding mainstream commercial success from the singles "Best I Ever Had" and "Successful", both gaining Gold certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), with the former also peaking at number two on the "Billboard" Hot 100. This prompted the mixtape's re-release as an EP, featuring only four songs from the original, as well as the additions of the songs "I'm Goin' In" and "Fear". It debuted at number six on the "Billboard" 200, and won the Rap Recording of the Year at the 2010 Juno Awards.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Due to the success of the mixtape, Drake was the subject of a bidding war from various labels, often reported as "one of the biggest bidding wars ever". Despite this, Drake was rumoured to have secured a recording contract with Young Money Entertainment on June 29, 2009. This was later confirmed following a planned lawsuit from Young Money, in conjunction with Drake, against an unauthorized fake album titled "The Girls Love Drake" released on iTunes.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Drake then joined the rest of the label's roster on the America's Most Wanted Tour in July 2009. However, during a performance of "Best I Ever Had" in Camden, New Jersey, Drake fell on stage and tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee. He underwent surgery later that year.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Drake planned to release his debut album, "Thank Me Later", in late 2008, but the album's release date was postponed, first to March 2010, and then to May 25, 2010. Young Money and Universal Motown had then released a statement that the album had again been pushed back three weeks for a June 15, 2010, release.


title: Drake (musician)

text: On March 9, 2010, Drake released the debut single "Over", which peaked at number fourteen on the "Billboard" Hot 100, as well as topping the Rap Songs chart. It also received a nomination for Best Rap Solo Performance at the 53rd Grammy Awards. His second single, "Find Your Love", became an even bigger success. It peaked at number five on the Hot 100, and was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The music video for the single was shot in Kingston, Jamaica, and was criticized by Jamaica's minister of tourism Edmund Bartlett. Bartlett condemned the portrayal of the island in the video, saying, "care has to be taken by all, including our creative artists, in [showcasing] images of our destination and people. Gun culture, while not unique to Jamaica, is not enhancing [the island's image]." The third single and fourth singles, "Miss Me" and "Fancy" respectively, attained moderate commercial success; however, the latter garnered Drake his second nomination at the 53rd Grammy Awards for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. On April 29, it was reportedly announced that Drake had finished "Thank Me Later" during a show in Kansas City, Missouri.


title: Drake (musician)

text: "Thank Me Later" was released on June 15, 2010, debuting at number one on the "Billboard" 200 with sales of over 447,000 copies in its first week. Upon the album's release, 25,000 fans gathered at New York City's South Street Seaport for a free concert hosted by Drake and Hanson, which was later cancelled by the police after a near-riot ensued due to overflowing crowds. The album became the top selling debut album for any artist in 2010, and featured Lil Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay Z.


title: Drake (musician)

text: It was soon announced that Drake would have a prominent role in the military science fiction video game, "Gears of War 3". He was scheduled to play the role of Jace Stratton, but scheduling conflicts with his upcoming Away from Home Tour prevented him from accepting the role. He began the tour on September 20, 2010, in Miami, Florida, performing at 78 shows over four different legs. It concluded in Las Vegas in November 2010. Due to the success of the Away from Home Tour, Drake hosted the first OVO Festival in 2010. It would soon become a regular event during the summer, with the Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto playing host to the festival on its annual cycle. Drake also had an eco-friendly college tour to support the album, beginning with Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. It concluded in Plymouth, New Hampshire on May 8, and he also performed at The Bamboozle on May 1.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Beginning his second effort in fall 2010, Drake announced his intentions to allow Noah "40" Shebib to handle most of the production and record a more cohesive sound than on "Thank Me Later", which featured disparate production duties by Shebib and others. In November 2010, Drake revealed the title of his next studio album will be "Take Care". In comparison to his debut album, Drake revealed to Y.C Radio 1 that "Thank Me Later" was a rushed album, stating, "I didn't get to take the time that I wanted to on that record. I rushed a lot of the songs and sonically I didn't get to sit with the record and say, 'I should change this verse.' Once it was done, it was done. That's why my new album is called "Take Care", because I get to take my time this go-round." Drake sought to expand on the low-tempo, sensuous, and dark sonic esthetic of "Thank Me Later". Primarily a hip hop album, Drake also attempted to incorporate R&B and pop to create a languid, grandiose sound.


title: Drake (musician)

text: In January 2011, Drake was in negotiations to join Eva Green and Susan Sarandon as a member of the cast in Nicholas Jarecki's "Arbitrage", before ultimately deciding against starring in the movie to focus on the album. "Dreams Money Can Buy" and "Marvins Room" were released on Drake's October's Very Own Blog, on May 20 and June 9, respectively. Acting as promotional singles for "Take Care", the former was eventually unincluded on the album's final track listing, while "Marvins Room" gained Gold certification by the RIAA, as well as peaking at number 21 on the "Billboard" Hot 100, and reaching the top 10 of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, coupled with extensive play on contemporary urban radio. Drake would soon release the song's music video on June 28.


title: Drake (musician)

text: "Headlines" was released on August 9 as the lead single for "Take Care". It was met with positive critical and commercial response, reaching number thirteen on the Hot 100, as well as becoming his tenth single to reach the summit of the "Billboard" Hot Rap Songs, making Drake the artist with the most number-one singles on the chart, with 12. It was eventually certified Platinum in both the United States and Canada. The music video for the single was released on October 2, and foresaw Drake performing the song during the second intermission of the 59th National Hockey League All-Star Game in January 2012. "Make Me Proud" was released as the album's second single on October 16. It was the final single to be released prior to the launch of the album, and debuted at number 97 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song reached number nine the following week, tying the record for the largest jump on the "Billboard" Hot 100 for a male artist, with 88. "Make Me Proud" soon became Drake's fourth consecutive single to receive Platinum certification by the RIAA.


title: Drake (musician)

text: Prior to the album's release, Drake planned to record a collaborative album with Lil Wayne; however, it was ultimately scrapped due to the success of "Watch the Throne". He also began collaborations with Rick Ross for a mixtape titled "Y.O.L.O.", but the duo decided against the project in favor of increased concern for their respective studio albums. Although in 2021, Ross stated that a joint album is still possible as they've casually discussed it.


title: Drake (musician)

text: "Take Care" was released on November 15, 2011, and received generally positive reviews from music critics. John McDonnell of "NME" dubbed it "an affecting masterpiece" and commended its "delicate, mellifluous sound and unashamedly candid, emotive lyrics." "Pitchfork"s Ryan Dombal found Drake's "technical abilities" to be improved and stated, "Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up." Andy Hutchins of "The Village Voice" called it "a carefully crafted bundle of contradictory sentiments from a conflicted rapper who explores his own neuroses in as compelling a manner as anyone not named Kanye West." "Chicago Tribune" writer Greg Kot complimented the depth of Drake's "moral psychodramas" and stated, "the best of it affirms that Drake is shaping a pop persona with staying power." It also won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, and achieved great commercial success, eventually being certified quadruple platinum by the RIAA in 2016, with sales for the album marking 2.6 million in the U.S.


title: Drake (musician)

text: The album's third and fourth singles, "The Motto" and Take Care", were released on November 29, 2011 and February 21, 2012, respectively. Each song was subject to commercial success, while also having large societal impacts, with "The Motto" credited for popularizing the phrase "YOLO" in the United States. The music video for "Take Care" saw widespread acclaim, with MTV stating, "None of his contemporaries – not even the ever-obtuse Kanye [West] – make videos like this, mostly because no one else can get away with it." The video received four nominations at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards for Best Male Video, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Video of the Year. The song was also featured on the channel's "Pop Songs You Must Hear" list of 2011. "HYFR" was the final single to be released from the album, and became certified Gold. It also won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Hip-Hop Video in 2012, and the channel ranked him number two on their "Hottest MCs in the Game" list.


title: Drake (musician)

text: On August 5, 2012, Drake released "Enough Said", performed by American recording artist Aaliyah featuring additional vocals provided by himself. Originally recorded prior to the singer's death in a plane crash in 2001, Drake later finished the track with producer "40". "Enough Said" was released by Blackground Records through their SoundCloud account on August 5, 2012. It was sent to US urban and rhythmic radio stations on August 21. The song charted at number 55 on the "Billboard" Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.


title: Drake (musician)

text: In promotion of his second album, Drake embarked on the worldwide Club Paradise Tour. It became the most successful hip hop tour of 2012, grossing over $42 million. He then returned to acting, starring in "" as Ethan.


title: Drake (musician)

text: During the European leg of the Club Paradise Tour, Drake spoke in an interview stating that he had begun working on his third studio album. Revealing his intentions to remain with 40 as the album's executive producer, Drake spoke fondly about Jamie xx, hoping to include and expand the British producer's influence over his next album. Drake had also revealed that the album would stylistically differ from "Take Care", departing from the ambient production and despondent lyrics prevalent previously.


title: Drake (musician)

text: In January 2013, Drake announced that he would release the first single off his third album at the end of the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. Despite an initial delay, it was released in the wake of his win for the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album at the event, and it foresaw Drake announcing "Nothing Was the Same" as the title of his third album. The album's second single, "Hold On, We're Going Home", was released in August 2013, becoming the most successful single off the album, peaking at number one on the "Billboard" Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Drake sought inspiration from the 1980s television series "Miami Vice" during the composition of the song's music video, incorporating the dramatic elements seen in the show en route to winning his second MTV Video Music Award in 2014 for the video. Drake appeared on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", performing the album's third single, "Too Much", alongside featured artist Sampha.


title: Drake (musician)

text: "Nothing Was the Same" was released on September 24, 2013, debuting at number one on the US "Billboard" 200, with 658,000 copies sold in its first week of release. The album debuted atop the charts in Canada, Denmark, Australia and the United Kingdom. The album also enjoyed generally favourable reviews by contemporary music critics, commending the musical shift in terms of the tone and subject matter, comparing it to the distinct change showcased in Kanye West's "808s & Heartbreak". The album was also reported to have sold over 1,720,000 copies in the United States, and was further promoted by the "Would You like a Tour?" throughout late 2013 to early 2014. It became the 22nd-most successful tour of the year, grossing an estimated $46 million. Drake then returned to acting in January 2014, hosting "Saturday Night Live", as well as serving as the musical guest. His versatility, acting ability and comedic timing were all praised by critics, describing it as what "kept him afloat during the tough and murky SNL waters". Drake also performed in Dubai, being one of the only artists ever to perform in the city. In late 2014, Drake announced that he began recording sessions for his fourth studio album.


title: Drake (musician)

text: In 2014, Drake performed in Spanish as a featured artist on the Romeo Santos song "Odio". He also appeared on a remix of "Tuesday" by ILoveMakonnen, which peaked at number one on Billboard's "Rhythmic" chart and number twelve on the "Hot 100", and released "0 to 100 / The Catch Up" as a non-album single. The latter went double platinum in the United States.


title: Drake (musician)

text: On February 12, 2015, Drake released "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" onto iTunes with no prior announcement. Despite debate on whether it was an album or a mixtape, its commercial stance quantifies it as his fourth retail project with Cash Money Records, a scheme that was rumoured to allow Drake to leave the label. However, he eventually remained with Cash Money, and "If You're Reading This It's Too Late" sold over 1 million units in 2015, making Drake the first artist with a platinum project in 2015, as well as his fourth overall.


title: Drake (musician)

text: On July 31, 2015, Drake released four singles: "Back to Back", "Charged Up", "Hotline Bling", and "Right Hand". On September 20, 2015, Drake released a collaborative mixtape with Future, which was recorded in Atlanta in just under a week.