δεῖ
it is necessary
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-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).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G1163 appears in the Book of Hebrews — 3 distinct verses. 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.
Hebrews
- Hebrews 2:1 δεῖ pres act ind 3sg Therefore we ought to pay greater attention to the things that were heard, lest perhaps we drift away.
- Hebrews 9:26 ἔδει impf act ind 3sg or else he must have suffered often since the foundation of the world. But now once at the end of the ages, he has been revealed to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
- Hebrews 11:6 δεῖ pres act ind 3sg Without faith it is impossible to be well pleasing to him, for he who comes to God must believe that he exists, and that he is a rewarder of those who seek him.
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.
At its core, δει (deî) means “it is necessary.” Translators differ — “must” in the King James Version, then “was necessary for” (unfoldingWord Literal Text), as the renderings breakdown shows. It turns up in 102 verses across 19 books, a common footprint. It first appears in Matthew 16:21. It clusters with δεω, δεομαι and δεσμον under a shared root. Dig into 102-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1163 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 →
- 102
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 102 distinct verses.
- 19 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 19 of 27 New Testament books.
- #159
- by frequency
- Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 159 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 102 occurrences in the concordance →
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 102 distinct verses.
- Gospels 42 verses · 41%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 41 verses · 40%
- Pauline corpus 24 verses · 24%
- Johannine 18 verses · 18%
- Revelation 8 verses · 8%
- Hebrews 3 verses · 3%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 2%
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: Must 57×, Ought 12×, He ought 3×
- American Standard Version: Must 51×, Ought 11×, He ought 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Must 53×, Ought 4×, Should 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Was necessary for 5×, Was necessary 4×, Necessary 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1163 across 105 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 16 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1163 across 98 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 24 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1163 across 98 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 19 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1163 across 19 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- it is necessary, there is need of, it behooves, is right and proper
Word origin
Derived from δεω (déō) (G1210) — to bind.
Third person singular active present of G1210 ; also δεόν deon which is neuter active participle of the same; both used impersonally; it is ( was etc.) necessary (as binding ): - behoved be meet must (needs) (be) need (-ful) ought should.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G1163 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| δεῖ deî | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 16:21 | 79 |
| ἔδει édei | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 18:33 | 16 |
| δεῖν deîn | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Luke 18:1 | 3 |
| δέον déon | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Acts 19:36 | 2 |
| δέῃ déē | Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 26:35 | 2 |
| δέοντα déonta | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | 1 Timothy 5:13 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1163, 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
- δεομαι déomai G1189 to ask
- δεσμον desmón G1199 bond
- δεσποτης despótēs G1203 master
- δημος dēmos G1218 people
- δουλος doûlos G1401 slave
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
