διακονέω
to serve
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
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- 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).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
2 verses where G1247 appears in the Present tense in the Book of 1 Peter. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
1 Peter
- 1 Peter 4:10 διακονοῦντες pres act ptcp nom pl masc According as each has received a gift, be ministering it among yourselves, as good stewards of the grace of God in its various forms.
- 1 Peter 4:11 διακονεῖ pres act ind 3sg If any man speaks, let it be as it were oracles of God. If any man serves, let it be as of the strength which God supplies, that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom belong the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
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.
“to serve” is the headline sense of the Greek verb διακονεω (diakonéō). Its English rendering has broadened — “ministered” classically, “serve” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. The Greek New Testament uses it across 32 verses — moderately common. Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 4:11. Related forms include διακονος and διακονια. See the sense tree, 32-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1247 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 →
- 32
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 32 distinct verses.
- 12 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 12 of 27 New Testament books.
- #397
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 397 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 32 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 32 distinct verses.
- Gospels 18 verses · 56%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 9 verses · 28%
- Pauline corpus 8 verses · 25%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 3 verses · 9%
- Johannine 2 verses · 6%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 3%
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: Ministered 8×, Minister 6×, Serve 6×
- American Standard Version: Ministered 7×, Serve 6×, Minister 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Serve 6×, Serves 6×, Ministered 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Serve 7×, Serving 6×, Be served 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1247 across 38 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 G1247 across 38 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 13 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 G1247 across 37 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 14 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 G1247 across 40 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.
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 be a servant, attendant, domestic, to serve, wait upon
Word origin
Derived from διακονος (diákonos) (G1249) — servant.
From G1249 ; to be an attendant that is wait upon (menially or as a host friend or [figuratively] teacher); technically to act as a Christian deacon : - (ad-) minister (unto) serve use the office of a deacon.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 19 distinct written forms G1247 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1247, 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.
