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δοῦλος

slave

‘slave’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G1401 Strong's Greek
doûlos Transliteration
/doo'-los/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 124 appearances

Compare with another word →

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 noun δουλος centers on the idea of “slave.” Its English rendering has broadened — “servant” classically, “slave” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. Spanning 117 verses in 21 books, it ranks among the common words of the Greek New Testament. Matthew dominates its distribution — 30 of 117 verses. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
bond
Modern gloss
slave
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G1401 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 →

117
distinct verses
The word appears in 117 distinct verses.
21 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 21 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 8:9
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 8:9.
Revelation 22:6
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:6.
#132
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 132 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 117 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 69 · 59%
  • Acts 3 · 3%
  • Pauline Epistles 27 · 23%
  • General Epistles 5 · 4%
  • Revelation 13 · 11%

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 117 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 69 verses · 59%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 28 verses · 24%
  • Pauline corpus 27 verses · 23%
  • Johannine 22 verses · 19%
  • Revelation 13 verses · 11%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 5 verses · 4%

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: Servant 64×, Servants 52×, Bond 4×
  • American Standard Version: Servant 53×, Servants 46×, Bond 4×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Servant 55×, Servants 35×, Slave 17×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Slave 37×, Servant 35×, Servants 34×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1401 across 127 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Servant” 64×
  • “Servants” 52×
  • “Bond” 4×
  • “Being a servant” 2×

Plus 5 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 G1401 across 134 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Servant” 53×
  • “Servants” 46×
  • “Bond” 4×
  • “Bondservant” 4×
  • “Of” 4×
  • “'s servant” 3×
  • “Bondservants” 3×
  • “To” 3×
  • “Being a bondservant” 2×
  • “Bondman” 2×
  • “Unto” 2×

Plus 8 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 G1401 across 125 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Servant” 55×
  • “Servants” 35×
  • “Slave” 17×
  • “Slaves” 10×
  • “Slavery” 3×

Plus 5 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.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G1401 across 142 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Slave” 37×
  • “Servant” 35×
  • “Servants” 34×
  • “Slaves” 16×
  • “To” 11×
  • “Of” 5×

Plus 4 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 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.

  1. a slave, bondman, man of servile condition
  2. a servant, attendant

Word origin

Derived from δεω (déō) (G1210) — to bind.

Part of speech: Noun TDNT: 06:21,2

From G1210 ; a slave (literally or figuratively involuntarily or voluntarily; frequently therefore in a qualified sense of subjection or subserviency ): - bond (-man) servant.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 13 distinct written forms G1401 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
δοῦλος doûlos Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 10:24 33
δοῦλοι doûloi Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 13:27 21
δούλους doúlous Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 21:34 18
δοῦλον doûlon Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 25:30 17
δούλοις doúlois Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 22:8 7
δούλου doúlou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 18:27 6
δούλῳ doúlō Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 8:9 6
δοῦλε doûle Noun, Vocative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 18:32 6
δούλων doúlōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 18:23 5
δοῦλός doûlós Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine John 8:34 2
Δούλους Doúlous Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Titus 2:9 1
δοῦλοί doûloí Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Romans 6:16 1
δοῦλόν doûlón Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Luke 2:29 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1401, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word δουλος appears 334 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 299 verses in 26 books.

334
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
299
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
26 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 26 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1401) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 299. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.

These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1401) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.