γονυπετέω
to kneel
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G1120 appears — 4 distinct verses across 2 books. 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 2 verses
- Matthew 17:14 γονυπετῶν pres act ptcp nom sg masc When they came to the multitude, a man came to him, kneeling down to him, saying,
- Matthew 27:29 γονυπετήσαντες aor act ptcp nom pl masc They braided a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and a reed in his right hand; and they kneeled down before him, and mocked him, saying, "Hail, King of the Jews!"
Mark 2 verses
- Mark 1:40 γονυπετῶν pres act ptcp nom sg masc There came to him a leper, begging him, kneeling down to him, and saying to him, "If you want to, you can make me clean."
- Mark 10:17 γονυπετήσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc As he was going out into the way, one ran to him, knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?"
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.
The Greek verb γονυπετεω centers on the idea of “to kneel.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. The word gravitates to Matthew (50%), then Mark. Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 17:14. It clusters with γονυ and γωνια under a shared root. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1120 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 4 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: Kneeling down 2×
- American Standard Version: Kneeled 1×, Kneeling 1×, Kneeling down 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Knelt before 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Having knelt before 1×, Having knelt down 1×, Kneeling before 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1120 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1120 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1120 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1120 across 4 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 fall on the knees, the act of imploring aid, and of expressing reverence and honour
Word origin
Derived from γονυ (góny) (G1119) — knee.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G1120 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| γονυπετῶν gonypetō̂n | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 17:14 | 2 |
| γονυπετήσαντες gonypetḗsantes | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 27:29 | 1 |
| γονυπετήσας gonypetḗsas | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Mark 10:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1120, 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.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
