ἐλαύνω
to drive
‘to drive’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
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).
- Perfect
- A completed past action with continuing present results.
Voice
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
3 distinct verses where G1643 appears in the Present tense, across 3 books. 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.
Mark 1 verse
James 1 verse
2 Peter 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.
“to drive” is the headline sense of the Greek verb ελαυνω (elaúnō). A scarce word — 5 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. Its earliest occurrence is Mark 6:48. Lexicons map it across 4 senses. Related forms include ελαφρος. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1643 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 5 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 5 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,648
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,648 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 verses · 60%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 40%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 20%
- Johannine 1 verse · 20%
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: Are carried 1×, Are driven 1×, Rowing 1×
- American Standard Version: Are driven 1×, Asunder 1×, Driven 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Are driven 1×, Been driven 1×, Driven 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Driven 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1643 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1643 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1643 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1643 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 4 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.
- of the wind driving ships or clouds
- of sailors propelling a vessel by oars, to row
- to be carried in a ship, to sail
- of demons driving to some place the men whom they possess
Word origin
Origin: a prolonged form of a primary verb (obsolete except in certain tenses as an altern. of this) of uncertain affin
A prolonged form of a primary verb (obsolete except in certain tenses as an alternate of this) of uncertain affinity; to push (as wind oars or daemoniacal power): - carry drive row.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G1643 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐλαυνόμενα elaunómena | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Neuter | James 3:4 | 1 |
| ἐλαυνόμεναι elaunómenai | Verb, Present, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | 2 Peter 2:17 | 1 |
| ἐλαύνειν elaúnein | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Mark 6:48 | 1 |
| ἐληλακότες elēlakótes | Verb, Perfect, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | John 6:19 | 1 |
| ἠλαύνετο ēlaúneto | Verb, Imperfect, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 8:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1643, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ελαυνω appears 4 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 3 books.
- 4
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 25:12 ἐλαύνω
- 1 Kings 9:16 ἐλαύνω
- Isaiah 33:21 ἐλαύνω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1643) 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.
- Exodus 25:12 ἐλαύνω You shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in its four feet. Two rings shall be on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it.
- 1 Kings 9:16 ἐλαύνω Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up, and taken Gezer, and burnt it with fire, and slain the Canaanites who lived in the city, and given it for a portion to his daughter, Solomon's wife.
- Isaiah 33:21 ἐλαύνω But there Yahweh will be with us in majesty, a place of broad rivers and streams, in which shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby.
- Isaiah 41:7 ἐλαύνω So the carpenter encourages the goldsmith, [and] he who smoothes with the hammer him who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, It is good; and he fastens it with nails, that is should not be moved.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1643) 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.
