ἀθλέω
to compete
‘to compete’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular 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 G118 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
2 Timothy 1 verse
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.
αθλεω — transliterated athléō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to compete.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 1 verse. Its uses cluster heavily in 2 Timothy (100% of all occurrences). Scripture uses it exactly once, at 2 Timothy 2:5. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. 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 G118 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 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 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Timothy 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 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: He strive 1×, Strive 1×
- American Standard Version: Contend in the games 1×, He have contended 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Competitor 1×, He competes 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Competed 1×, Competes 1×, He has 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G118 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G118 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G118 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G118 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 senses 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 engage in a contest, contend in public games, contend for a prize
- to endure, suffer
Word origin
Origin: from athlos (a contest in the public lists)
From ἄθλος athlos (a contest in the public lists); to contend in the competitive games : - strive.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G118 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀθλήσῃ athlḗsē | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | 2 Timothy 2:5 | 1 |
| ἀθλῇ athlē̂ | Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Singular | 2 Timothy 2:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G118, 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.
