ἕλκος
wound
‘wound’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Genitive-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where G1668 appears in the Genitive case in the Book of Revelation. 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.
Revelation
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.
At its core, ελκος (hélkos) means “wound.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. The word gravitates to Revelation (67%), then Luke. It first appears in Luke 16:21. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1668 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.
- #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
- Revelation 2 verses 67%
- Luke 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Johannine 2 verses · 67%
- Revelation 2 verses · 67%
- Gospels 1 verse · 33%
- 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: Sores 2×
- American Standard Version: Sore 1×, Sores 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sores 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sores 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1668 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 G1668 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1668 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1668 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 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.
- a wound, esp. a wound producing a discharge pus
- a sore, an ulcer
Word origin
Derived from ελκυω (helkýō) (G1670) — to draw.
Probably from G1670 ; an ulcer (as if drawn together): - sore.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G1668 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἑλκῶν helkō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter | Revelation 16:11 | 1 |
| ἕλκη hélkē | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | Luke 16:21 | 1 |
| ἕλκος hélkos | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Revelation 16:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1668, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ελκος appears 14 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 13 verses in 5 books.
- 14
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 13
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 9:9 ἕλκος
- Leviticus 13:18 ἕλκος
- Deuteronomy 28:27 ἕλκος
- 2 Kings 20:7 ἕλκος
- Job 2:7 ἕλκος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1668) 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 9:9 ἕλκος It shall become small dust over all the land of Egypt, and shall be a boil breaking forth with boils on man and on animal, throughout all the land of Egypt."
- Exodus 9:10 ἕλκος They took ashes of the furnace, and stood before Pharaoh; and Moses sprinkled it up toward the sky; and it became a boil breaking forth with boils on man and on animal.
- Exodus 9:11 ἕλκος The magicians couldn't stand before Moses because of the boils; for the boils were on the magicians, and on all the Egyptians.
- Leviticus 13:18 ἕλκος "When the body has a boil on its skin, and it has healed,
- Leviticus 13:19 ἕλκος and in the place of the boil there is a white rising, or a bright spot, reddish-white, then it shall be shown to the priest;
- Leviticus 13:20 ἕλκος and the priest shall examine it; and, behold, if the appearance of it is lower than the skin, and the hair of it has turned white, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is the plague of leprosy. It has broken out in the boil.
- Leviticus 13:22 ἕλκος If it spreads in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is a plague.
- Leviticus 13:23 ἕλκος But if the bright spot stays in its place, and hasn't spread, it is the scar from the boil; and the priest shall pronounce him clean.
- Leviticus 13:27 ἕλκος The priest shall examine him on the seventh day. If it has spread in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean. It is the plague of leprosy.
- Deuteronomy 28:27 ἕλκος Yahweh will strike you with the boil of Egypt, and with the tumors, and with the scurvy, and with the itch, of which you can not be healed.
- Deuteronomy 28:35 ἕλκος Yahweh will strike you in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore boil, of which you can not be healed, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.
- 2 Kings 20:7 ἕλκος Isaiah said, Take a cake of figs. They took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.
- Job 2:7 ἕλκος So Satan went forth from the presence of Yahweh, and struck Job with painful sores from the sole of his foot to his head.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1668) 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.
