ἐργάτης
worker
‘worker’ 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 Accusative-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.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine 6 times (38%)
- Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 4 times (25%)
- Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 3 times (19%)
- Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine 2 times (13%)
- Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (6%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 16 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G2040 appears — 15 distinct verses across 8 books. 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.
Matthew 6 verses
- Matthew 9:37 ἐργάται n nom pl masc Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest indeed is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
- Matthew 9:38 ἐργάτας n acc pl masc Pray therefore that the Lord of the harvest will send out laborers into his harvest."
- Matthew 10:10 ἐργάτης n nom sg masc Take no bag for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff: for the laborer is worthy of his food.
- Matthew 20:1 ἐργάτας n acc pl masc "For the Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who was the master of a household, who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
- Matthew 20:2 ἐργατῶν n gen pl masc When he had agreed with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard.
- Matthew 20:8 ἐργάτας n acc pl masc When evening had come, the lord of the vineyard said to his steward, 'Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning from the last to the first.'
Luke 3 verses
- Luke 10:2 ἐργάται ἐργάτας n nom pl masc n acc pl masc Then he said to them, "The harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore to the Lord of the harvest, that he may send out laborers into his harvest.
- Luke 10:7 ἐργάτης n nom sg masc Remain in that same house, eating and drinking the things they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Don't go from house to house.
- Luke 13:27 ἐργάται n nom pl masc He will say, 'I tell you, I don't know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity.'
Acts 1 verse
2 Corinthians 1 verse
Philippians 1 verse
1 Timothy 1 verse
2 Timothy 1 verse
James 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.
εργατης — transliterated ergátēs — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “worker.” The King James Version usually renders it “labourers,” while modern versions prefer “workers” (Berean Standard Bible) — see the renderings breakdown. With 15 verses in 8 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Matthew (40% of all occurrences). Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. See the sense tree, 15-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2040 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 →
- 15
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
- 8 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 8 of 27 New Testament books.
- #726
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 726 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 15 occurrences in the concordance →
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 15 distinct verses.
- Gospels 9 verses · 60%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 4 verses · 27%
- Pauline corpus 4 verses · 27%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 7%
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: Labourers 8×, Labourer 2×, Workers 2×
- American Standard Version: Laborers 8×, Laborer 3×, Workers 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Workers 8×, Worker 3×, Workmen 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Workers 7×, Laborers 4×, Laborer 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2040 across 16 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 G2040 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 G2040 across 15 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2040 across 16 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.
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.
- usually one who works for hire esp. an agricultural worker
- one who does, a worker, perpetrator
Word origin
Derived from εργον (érgon) (G2041) — work.
From G2041 ; a toiler ; figuratively a teacher : - labourer worker (-men).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G2040 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐργάτας ergátas | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 9:38 | 6 |
| ἐργάται ergátai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 9:37 | 4 |
| ἐργάτης ergátēs | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 10:10 | 3 |
| ἐργατῶν ergatō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 20:2 | 2 |
| ἐργάτην ergátēn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | 2 Timothy 2:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2040, 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.
