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εἰ

if

G1487 Strong's Greek
ei Transliteration
/i/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 491 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.

“if” is the headline sense of the Greek conjunction ει (ei). Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 4:3. It turns up in 449 verses across 25 books, a common footprint. It clusters with εαν, ειγε and ει δε μη(γε) under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
forasmuch as
Modern gloss
if
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 G1487 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 →

449
distinct verses
The word appears in 449 distinct verses.
25 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 25 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 4:3
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 4:3.
Revelation 21:27
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 21:27.
#40
by frequency
Top 50 most frequent Greek words (rank 40 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 449 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 184 · 41%
  • Acts 31 · 7%
  • Pauline Epistles 171 · 38%
  • General Epistles 49 · 11%
  • Revelation 14 · 3%

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 449 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 184 verses · 41%
  • Pauline corpus 171 verses · 38%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 83 verses · 18%
  • Johannine 68 verses · 15%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 33 verses · 7%
  • Hebrews 16 verses · 4%
  • Revelation 14 verses · 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: If 236×, Whether 21×, That 5×
  • American Standard Version: If 305×, Whether 22×, But 10×
  • Berean Standard Bible: If 322×, Except 37×, Only 17×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: If 400×, Except 65×, Whether 17×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1487 across 281 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “If” 236×
  • “Whether” 21×
  • “That” 5×
  • “Is it lawful” 3×
  • “For” 2×
  • “Is it” 2×

Plus 12 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 11 further occurrences.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G1487 across 424 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “If” 305×
  • “Whether” 22×
  • “But” 10×
  • “Save” 5×
  • “Though” 5×
  • “Except” 3×
  • “It” 3×
  • “For” 2×
  • “He” 2×
  • “Him” 2×
  • “How that” 2×
  • “Is it” 2×

Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 49 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 4 further occurrences.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G1487 across 441 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “If” 322×
  • “Except” 37×
  • “Only” 17×
  • “But” 11×
  • “Since” 8×
  • “Whether” 7×
  • “Though” 6×
  • “That” 5×
  • “Unless” 4×
  • “He does” 3×
  • “Have” 2×
  • “See if” 2×

Plus 17 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 38 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G1487 across 514 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “If” 400×
  • “Except” 65×
  • “Whether” 17×
  • “Unless” 6×
  • “Except for” 3×
  • “Indeed” 3×
  • “Is” 3×
  • “Perhaps” 2×
  • “Whatever” 2×

Plus 13 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.

  1. if, whether

Word origin

Origin: a primary particle of conditionality

Part of speech: Conjunction

A primary particle of conditionality; if whether that etc. : - forasmuch as if that ([al-]) though whether. Often used in connection or composition with other particles especially as in G1489 G1490 G1499 G1508 G1509 G1512 G1513 G1536 and G1537 . See also G1437 .

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


Forms in the corpus

The 5 distinct written forms G1487 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
εἰ ei Conditional Matthew 4:3 414
εἴ eí Conditional Matthew 16:24 64
Εἰ Ei Conditional John 15:18 10
Εἴ Eí Conditional 1 Corinthians 14:37 2
εἶ eî Conditional Acts 7:1 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1487, 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 → Showing 4 of 10 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word ει appears 617 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 531 verses in 35 books.

617
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
531
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
35 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 35 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1487) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 531. 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 (G1487) 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.