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αἰών

age

‘age’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

G165 Strong's Greek
aiṓn Transliteration
/ahee-ohn'/ 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 αιων centers on the idea of “age.” The King James Version usually renders it “ever,” while modern versions prefer “forever” (Berean Standard Bible) and “ages” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. Spanning 97 verses in 22 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Greek New Testament. Debuting at Matthew 12:32, it then recurs through the corpus. Thayer's distinguishes 3 senses for it. Dig into 97-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
age
Modern gloss
age
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G165 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 →

97
distinct verses
The word appears in 97 distinct verses.
22 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 22 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 12:32
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 12:32.
Revelation 22:5
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:5.
#132
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 132 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 97 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 31 · 32%
  • Acts 2 · 2%
  • Pauline Epistles 30 · 31%
  • General Epistles 21 · 22%
  • Revelation 13 · 13%

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 97 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 31 verses · 32%
  • Pauline corpus 30 verses · 31%
  • Johannine 27 verses · 28%
  • Hebrews 13 verses · 13%
  • Revelation 13 verses · 13%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 9 verses · 9%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 8 verses · 8%

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: Ever 70×, World 31×, Evermore 3×
  • American Standard Version: Ever 68×, World 25×, Ages 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Forever 43×, Age 22×, Ever 22×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ages 35×, Age 30×, Eternity 30×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G165 across 117 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Ever” 70×
  • “World” 31×
  • “Evermore” 3×
  • “World began” 3×
  • “Ages” 2×
  • “Beginning of the world” 2×
  • “Eternal” 2×
  • “Worlds” 2×

Plus 2 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 G165 across 118 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Ever” 68×
  • “World” 25×
  • “Ages” 5×
  • “Evermore” 4×
  • “Old” 3×
  • “Worlds” 3×
  • “Eternal” 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 G165 across 108 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Forever” 43×
  • “Age” 22×
  • “Ever” 22×
  • “Ages” 5×
  • “Ages past” 2×
  • “Eternal” 2×
  • “Eternity” 2×
  • “Life” 2×
  • “Time” 2×
  • “Universe” 2×

Plus 4 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 16 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G165 across 133 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Ages” 35×
  • “Age” 30×
  • “Eternity” 30×
  • “Forever” 14×
  • “Of” 9×
  • “Ever” 8×

Plus 7 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 3 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. for ever, an unbroken age, perpetuity of time, eternity
  2. the worlds, universe
  3. period of time, age

Word origin

Derived from αει (aeí) (G104) — always.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 04:17,3

From the same as G104 ; properly an age ; by extension perpetuity (also past); by implication the world ; specifically (Jewish) a messianic period (present or future): - age course eternal (for) ever (-more) [n-] ever (beginning of the while the) world (began without end). Compare G5550 .

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


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms G165 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
αἰῶνα aiō̂na Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 21:19 31
αἰῶνας aiō̂nas Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Luke 1:33 30
αἰώνων aiṓnōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Romans 16:27 29
αἰῶνος aiō̂nos Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 13:22 24
αἰῶνι aiō̂ni Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 12:32 8
αἰῶνός aiō̂nós Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 13:39 1
αἰῶσιν aiō̂sin Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Ephesians 2:7 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G165, 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 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αιων appears 459 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 391 verses in 31 books.

459
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
391
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
31 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 31 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G165) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 391. 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 (G165) 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.