ἐπιστολή
letter
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Dative-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).
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
1 verse where G1992 appears in the Dative case in the Book of 1 Corinthians. 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 Corinthians
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.
επιστολη (epistolḗ) is a Greek noun most often rendered “letter.” The King James Version usually renders it “epistle,” while modern versions prefer “letter” (Berean Standard Bible) — see the renderings breakdown. With 23 verses in 8 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. It concentrates in 2 Corinthians, which alone accounts for 30% of its uses. Debuting at Acts 9:2, it then recurs through the corpus. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1992 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 →
- 23
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 23 distinct verses.
- 8 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 8 of 27 New Testament books.
- #548
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 548 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 23 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Corinthians 7 verses 30%
- Acts 5 verses 22%
- 2 Thessalonians 4 verses 17%
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 23 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 16 verses · 70%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 5 verses · 22%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 9%
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: Epistle 13×, Letters 6×, Letter 3×
- American Standard Version: Epistle 14×, Letters 5×, Epistles 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Letter 16×, Letters 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Letter 15×, Letters 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1992 across 24 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1992 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1992 across 24 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1992 across 25 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 1 sense 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 letter, epistle
Word origin
Derived from επιστελλω (epistéllō) (G1989) — to write.
From G1989 ; a written message : - epistle letter.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms G1992 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐπιστολὴν epistolḕn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Acts 23:25 | 4 |
| ἐπιστολῶν epistolō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Feminine | 1 Corinthians 16:3 | 4 |
| ἐπιστολὴ epistolḕ | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | 2 Corinthians 3:2 | 3 |
| ἐπιστολῆς epistolē̂s | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | 2 Thessalonians 2:2 | 3 |
| ἐπιστολῇ epistolē̂ | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | 1 Corinthians 5:9 | 3 |
| ἐπιστολήν epistolḗn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Acts 15:30 | 2 |
| ἐπιστολὰς epistolàs | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine | Acts 9:2 | 2 |
| ἐπιστολή epistolḗ | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Colossians 4:16 | 1 |
| ἐπιστολαὶ epistolaì | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | 2 Corinthians 10:10 | 1 |
| ἐπιστολαῖς epistolaîs | Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine | 2 Peter 3:16 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word επιστολη appears 20 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 19 verses in 6 books.
- 20
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 19
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 2 Chronicles 30:1 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 4:6 ἐπιστολή
- Esther 3:14 ἐπιστολή
- Isaiah 18:2 ἐπιστολή
- Jeremiah 36:1 ἐπιστολή
- Daniel 4:29 ἐπιστολή
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1992) 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.
- 2 Chronicles 30:1 ἐπιστολή Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah, and wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of Yahweh at Jerusalem, to keep the Passover to Yahweh, the God of Israel.
- 2 Chronicles 30:6 ἐπιστολή So the posts went with the letters from the king and his princes throughout all Israel and Judah, and according to the commandment of the king, saying, You children of Israel, turn again to Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, that he may return to the remnant that have escaped of you out of the hand of the kings of Assyria.
- Ezra 4:6 ἐπιστολή In the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign, wrote they an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem.
- Ezra 4:8 ἐπιστολή Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to Artaxerxes the king in this sort:
- Ezra 4:11 ἐπιστολή This is the copy of the letter that they sent to Artaxerxes the king: Your servants the men beyond the River, and so forth.
- Ezra 5:6 ἐπιστολή The copy of the letter that Tattenai, the governor beyond the River, and Shetharbozenai, and his companions the Apharsachites, who were beyond the River, sent to Darius the king;
- Ezra 12:7 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 12:8 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 12:9 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 16:5 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 16:17 ἐπιστολή
- Ezra 16:19 ἐπιστολή
- Esther 3:14 ἐπιστολή A copy of the writing, that the decree should be given out in every province, was published to all the peoples, that they should be ready against that day.
- Esther 9:26 ἐπιστολή Therefore they called these days Purim, after the name of Pur. Therefore because of all the words of this letter, and of that which they had seen concerning this matter, and that which had come to them,
- Esther 9:29 ἐπιστολή Then Esther the queen, the daughter of Abihail, and Mordecai the Jew, wrote with all authority to confirm this second letter of Purim.
- Isaiah 18:2 ἐπιστολή that sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus on the waters, [saying], Go, you swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that measures out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide!
- Isaiah 39:1 ἐπιστολή At that time Merodach Baladan the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters and a present to Hezekiah; for he heard that he had been sick, and was recovered.
- Jeremiah 36:1 ἐπιστολή It happened in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, that this word came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying,
- Daniel 4:29 ἐπιστολή At the end of twelve months he was walking in the royal palace of Babylon.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1992) 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.