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αἰώνιος

eternal

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

G166 Strong's Greek
aiṓnios Transliteration
/ahee-o'-nee-os/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 70 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.

αιωνιος (aiṓnios) is a Greek adjective most often rendered “eternal.” Where the King James Version keeps “everlasting,” modern versions use “eternal” — see the renderings breakdown. The Greek New Testament uses it across 68 verses — moderately common. John dominates its distribution — 17 of 68 verses. Its lexical range runs to 3 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
eternal
Modern gloss
eternal
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 G166 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 →

68
distinct verses
The word appears in 68 distinct verses.
19 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 19 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 18:8
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 18:8.
Revelation 14:6
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 14:6.
#239
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 239 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 68 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 29 · 43%
  • Acts 2 · 3%
  • Pauline Epistles 20 · 29%
  • General Epistles 16 · 24%
  • Revelation 1 · 1%

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 68 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 29 verses · 43%
  • Johannine 24 verses · 35%
  • Pauline corpus 20 verses · 29%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 10 verses · 15%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 6 verses · 9%
  • Hebrews 6 verses · 9%
  • Revelation 1 verse · 1%

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: Eternal 40×, Everlasting 25×
  • American Standard Version: Eternal 65×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Eternal 66×, Began 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Eternal 65×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G166 across 69 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eternal” 40×
  • “Everlasting” 25×

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 2 further occurrences.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G166 across 70 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eternal” 65×

Plus 5 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 G166 across 70 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eternal” 66×
  • “Began” 2×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G166 across 70 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Eternal” 65×

Plus 5 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. without beginning and end, that which always has been and always will be
  2. without beginning
  3. without end, never to cease, everlasting

Word origin

Derived from αιων (aiṓn) (G165) — age.

Part of speech: Adjective TDNT: 04:28,3

From G165 ; perpetual (also used of past time or past and future as well): - eternal for ever everlasting world (began).

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


Forms in the corpus

The 9 distinct written forms G166 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
αἰώνιον aiṓnion Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 19:16 45
αἰωνίου aiōníou Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Mark 3:29 14
αἰώνιος aiṓnios Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine John 17:3 3
αἰωνίαν aiōnían Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine 2 Thessalonians 2:16 2
αἰωνίων aiōníōn Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Masculine 2 Timothy 1:9 2
αἰωνίοις aiōníois Adjective, Dative, Plural, Masculine Romans 16:25 1
αἰωνίους aiōníous Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Luke 16:9 1
αἰώνια aiṓnia Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Neuter 2 Corinthians 4:18 1
αἰώνιός aiṓniós Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine John 12:50 1

Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αιωνιος appears 114 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 110 verses in 16 books.

114
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
110
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
16 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 16 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G166) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 110. 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 (G166) 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.