ἀδυνατέω
impossible
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G101 appears in the Book of Matthew — 1 distinct verse. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
Matthew
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
αδυνατεω — transliterated adynatéō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “impossible.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in Matthew. It first appears in Matthew 17:20. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G101 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 50%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Shall be impossible 2×
- American Standard Version: Shall be impossible 1×, Shall be void of power 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fail 1×, Will be impossible 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Be impossible 1×, Will 1×, Will be impossible 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G101 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G101 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G101 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G101 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 1 sense Thayer's distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- impossible
Word origin
Derived from αδυνατος (adýnatos) (G102) — weak.
From G102 ; to be unable that is (passively) impossible : - be impossible.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αδυνατεω appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 10 verses in 8 books.
- 11
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 10
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 18:14 ἀδυνατέω
- Leviticus 25:35 ἀδυνατέω
- Deuteronomy 17:8 ἀδυνατέω
- 2 Chronicles 14:10 ἀδυνατέω
- Job 4:4 ἀδυνατέω
- Psalms 128:2 ἀδυνατέω
- Isaiah 8:15 ἀδυνατέω
- Zechariah 8:6 ἀδυνατέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G101) appears in the Greek Septuagint. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 18:14 ἀδυνατέω Is anything too hard for Yahweh? At the set time I will return to you, when the season comes round, and Sarah will have a son."
- Leviticus 25:35 ἀδυνατέω "'If your brother has become poor, and his hand can't support him among you; then you shall uphold him. As a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you.
- Deuteronomy 17:8 ἀδυνατέω If there arise a matter too hard for you in judgment, between blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke, being matters of controversy within your gates; then shall you arise, and go up to the place which Yahweh your God shall choose;
- 2 Chronicles 14:10 ἀδυνατέω Then Asa went out to meet him, and they set the battle in array in the valley of Zephathah at Mareshah.
- Job 4:4 ἀδυνατέω Your words have supported him who was falling, You have made firm the feeble knees.
- Job 10:13 ἀδυνατέω Yet you hid these things in your heart. I know that this is with you:
- Job 42:2 ἀδυνατέω "I know that you can do all things, And that no purpose of yours can be restrained.
- Psalms 128:2 ἀδυνατέω For you will eat the labor of your hands. You will be happy, and it will be well with you.
- Isaiah 8:15 ἀδυνατέω Many shall stumble thereon, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.
- Zechariah 8:6 ἀδυνατέω Thus says Yahweh of Hosts: "If it is marvelous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in those days, should it also be marvelous in my eyes?" says Yahweh of Hosts.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G101) in the Septuagint — not a translation of any one Hebrew word. The store carries no word-level Hebrew↔Greek alignment, so no Hebrew original is asserted here. Counts come from the recovered LXX Strong's tagging — high-frequency vocabulary is well covered, while rare or late forms may be untagged — so they reflect tagged occurrences and may slightly undercount.
