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ἐκπνέω

to expire

G1606 Strong's Greek
ekpnéō Transliteration
/ek-pneh'-o/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 3 appearances

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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.

εκπνεω — transliterated ekpnéō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to expire.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. Its uses cluster heavily in Mark (67% of all occurrences). Its earliest occurrence is Mark 15:37. Sharing its root, it stands alongside εκ, εκβαλλω and εκβασις. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
give up the ghost
Modern gloss
to expire
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 G1606 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 →

3
distinct verses
The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
2 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
Mark 15:37
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Mark 15:37.
Luke 23:46
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Luke 23:46.
#2,203
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 3 · 100%
  • Acts 0 · 0%
  • Pauline Epistles 0 · 0%
  • General Epistles 0 · 0%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 3 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 3 verses · 100%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 33%

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: Gave up the ghost 2×
  • American Standard Version: Gave up the ghost 1×, He gave up the ghost 1×, Up the ghost 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Breathed his last 1×, He breathed his last 1×, He had breathed his last 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: He expired 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G1606 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Gave up the ghost” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G1606 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Gave up the ghost” 1×
  • “He gave up the ghost” 1×
  • “Up the ghost” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G1606 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breathed his last” 1×
  • “He breathed his last” 1×
  • “He had breathed his last” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G1606 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “He expired” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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. to breathe out, breathe out one's life, breathe one's last, expire

Word origin

Derived from εκ (ek) (G1537) — from.

Part of speech: Verb TDNT: 13:32,9

From G1537 and G4154 ; to expire : - give up the ghost.

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


Same root — word family

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.