ἐλαττονέω
to be less
‘to be less’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
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).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G1641 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 Corinthians 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.
ελαττονεω (elattonéō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to be less.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Greek New Testament. 2 Corinthians dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at 2 Corinthians 8:15. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1641 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.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Corinthians 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: Had 1×, Lack 1×
- American Standard Version: Had 1×, Lack 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Had no shortfall 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Did 1×, Have too little 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1641 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1641 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1641 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1641 across 2 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 be less, inferior, (in possessions)
- to make less, diminish
Word origin
Derived from ελασσων (elássōn) (G1640) — less.
From G1640 ; to diminish that is fall short : - have lack.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1641, 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.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ελαττονεω appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 4 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 8:3 ἐλαττονέω
- Exodus 16:18 ἐλαττονέω
- 1 Kings 11:22 ἐλαττονέω
- Proverbs 11:24 ἐλαττονέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1641) appears in the Greek Septuagint. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 8:3 ἐλαττονέω The waters receded from off the earth continually. After the end of one hundred fifty days the waters decreased.
- Genesis 8:5 ἐλαττονέω The waters receded continually until the tenth month. In the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen.
- Exodus 16:18 ἐλαττονέω When they measured it with an omer, he who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack. They gathered every man according to his eating.
- Exodus 30:15 ἐλαττονέω The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half shekel, when they give the offering of Yahweh, to make atonement for your souls.
- 1 Kings 11:22 ἐλαττονέω Then Pharaoh said to him, But what have you lacked with me, that behold, you seek to go to your own country? He answered, Nothing: however only let me depart.
- 1 Kings 17:14 ἐλαττονέω For thus says Yahweh, the God of Israel, The jar of meal shall not empty, neither shall the jar of oil fail, until the day that Yahweh sends rain on the earth.
- 1 Kings 17:16 ἐλαττονέω The jar of meal didn't empty, neither did the jar of oil fail, according to the word of Yahweh, which he spoke by Elijah.
- Proverbs 11:24 ἐλαττονέω There is one who scatters, and increases yet more. There is one who withholds more than is appropriate, but gains poverty.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1641) 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.
