γελάω
to laugh
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Future-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G1070 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Luke 2 verses
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.
γελαω — transliterated geláō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to laugh.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 2 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Luke (100% of all occurrences). Debuting at Luke 6:21, it then recurs through the corpus. Sharing its root, it stands alongside γελως. 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 G1070 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.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Luke 2 verses 100%
By section of the New Testament
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) 2 verses · 100%
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: Laugh 1×, Ye shall laugh 1×
- American Standard Version: Ye shall laugh 1×, Ye that laugh 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Laugh 1×, You will laugh 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Laughing 1×, You will laugh 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1070 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1070 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1070 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1070 across 2 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.
- to laugh
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain affinity
Of uncertain affinity; to laugh (as a sign of joy or satisfaction): - laugh.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G1070 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| γελάσετε gelásete | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural | Luke 6:21 | 1 |
| γελῶντες gelō̂ntes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 6:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1070, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word γελαω appears 12 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 11 verses in 6 books.
- 12
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 11
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 17:17 γελάω
- Job 19:7 γελάω
- Psalms 51:8 γελάω
- Ecclesiastes 3:4 γελάω
- Jeremiah 20:8 γελάω
- Lamentations 1:7 γελάω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1070) 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 17:17 γελάω Then Abraham fell on his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, "Will a child be born to him who is one hundred years old? Will Sarah, who is ninety years old, give birth?"
- Genesis 18:12 γελάω Sarah laughed within herself, saying, "After I have grown old will I have pleasure, my lord being old also?"
- Genesis 18:13 γελάω Yahweh said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Will I really bear a child, yet I am old?'
- Genesis 18:15 γελάω Then Sarah denied, saying, "I didn't laugh," for she was afraid." He said, "No, but you did laugh."
- Job 19:7 γελάω "Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry for help, but there is no justice.
- Job 22:19 γελάω The righteous see it, and are glad; The innocent ridicule them,
- Job 29:24 γελάω I smiled on them when they had no confidence. They didn't reject the light of my face.
- Psalms 51:8 γελάω Let me hear joy and gladness, That the bones which you have broken may rejoice.
- Ecclesiastes 3:4 γελάω A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance;
- Jeremiah 20:8 γελάω For as often as I speak, I cry out; I cry, Violence and destruction! because the word of Yahweh is made a reproach to me, and a derision, all the day.
- Lamentations 1:7 γελάω Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and of her miseries all her pleasant things that were from the days of old: When her people fell into the hand of the adversary, and none did help her, The adversaries saw her, they did mock at her desolations.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1070) 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.
