ἐπιποθέω
to long for
‘to long for’ is one of 3 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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- 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).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
1 distinct verse where G1971 appears in the Aorist tense, across 1 book. 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.
1 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.
επιποθεω — transliterated epipothéō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to long for.” Debuting at Romans 1:11, it then recurs through the corpus. With 9 verses in 7 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. Thayer's distinguishes 3 senses for it. Sharing its root, it stands alongside επι, επαγγελλω and επαγω. 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 G1971 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,140
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,140 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Corinthians 2 verses 22%
- Philippians 2 verses 22%
- Romans 1 verse 11%
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 9 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 7 verses · 78%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 22%
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: Desire 1×, Desiring greatly 1×, Earnestly desiring 1×
- American Standard Version: Longing 3×, I long 2×, Long 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: I long 2×, Longing 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Longing 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1971 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1971 across 9 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1971 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 G1971 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to long for, desire
- to pursue with love, to long after
- to lust, harbour forbidden desire
Word origin
Derived from επι (epí) (G1909) — upon.
From G1909 and ποθέω potheō (to yearn ); to dote upon that is intensely crave possession (lawfully or wrongfully): - (earnestly) desire (greatly) (greatly) long (after) lust.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G1971 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐπιποθοῦντες epipothoûntes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | 2 Corinthians 5:2 | 2 |
| ἐπιποθῶ epipothō̂ | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Romans 1:11 | 2 |
| ἐπιποθῶν epipothō̂n | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Philippians 2:26 | 2 |
| ἐπιποθήσατε epipothḗsate | Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | 1 Peter 2:2 | 1 |
| ἐπιποθεῖ epipotheî | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | James 4:5 | 1 |
| ἐπιποθούντων epipothoúntōn | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | 2 Corinthians 9:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1971, 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
- επαγγελλω epangéllō G1861 to announce
- επαγω epágō G1863 to bring upon
- επαγωνιζομαι epagōnízomai G1864 to contend
- επαθροιζω epathroízō G1865 to gather together
- επαινεω epainéō G1867 to approve
- επαινος épainos G1868 approval
- επαιρω epaírō G1869 to lift up
- επαισχυνομαι epaischýnomai G1870 to be ashamed
- επαιτεω epaitéō G1871 to ask repeatedly
- επακουω epakoúō G1873 to give ear to
- επακροαομαι epakroáomai G1874 to listen to
- επαν epán G1875 after
- επαναγκες epánankes G1876 necessarily
- επαναγω epanágō G1877 to lead back
- επαναμιμνησκω epanamimnḗskō G1878 to remind
- επαναπαυομαι epanapaúomai G1879 to rest upon
- επανερχομαι epanérchomai G1880 to return
- επανισταμαι epanístamai G1881 to raise up against
- επανορθωσις epanórthōsis G1882 correction
- επανω epánō G1883 above
- επαρκεω eparkéō G1884 to avail
- επαρχια eparchía G1885 office of governor
- επαυλις épaulis G1886 farm
- επαυριον epaúrion G1887 the next day
+110 more words share this root (not shown).
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 139 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word επιποθεω appears 7 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 3 books.
- 7
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- 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
- Deuteronomy 13:9 ἐπιποθέω
- Psalms 41:2 ἐπιποθέω
- Jeremiah 13:14 ἐπιποθέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1971) 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.
- Deuteronomy 13:9 ἐπιποθέω but you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first on him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
- Psalms 41:2 ἐπιποθέω Yahweh will preserve him, and keep him alive, He shall be blessed on the earth, And he will not surrender him to the will of his enemies.
- Psalms 61:11 ἐπιποθέω
- Psalms 83:3 ἐπιποθέω They conspire with cunning against your people. They plot against your cherished ones.
- Psalms 118:131 ἐπιποθέω
- Jeremiah 13:14 ἐπιποθέω I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, says Yahweh: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have compassion, that I should not destroy them.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1971) 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.
