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ἔργον

work

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

G2041 Strong's Greek
érgon Transliteration
/er'-gon/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 169 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.

εργον (érgon) is a Greek noun most often rendered “work.” It first appears in Matthew 5:16. With 157 verses in 26 books, it is a common word in the Greek New Testament. Ranging over 3 senses, it is not a single-sense word. It clusters with εργαζομαι, εργατης and ραδιουργημα under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
deed
Modern gloss
work
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G2041 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 →

157
distinct verses
The word appears in 157 distinct verses.
26 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 26 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 5:16
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 5:16.
Revelation 22:12
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:12.
#94
by frequency
Top 100 most frequent Greek words (rank 94 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 157 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 35 · 22%
  • Acts 9 · 6%
  • Pauline Epistles 63 · 40%
  • General Epistles 31 · 20%
  • Revelation 19 · 12%

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 157 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 63 verses · 40%
  • Johannine 49 verses · 31%
  • Gospels 35 verses · 22%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 22 verses · 14%
  • Revelation 19 verses · 12%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 11 verses · 7%
  • Hebrews 9 verses · 6%

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: Works 103×, Work 47×, Deeds 16×
  • American Standard Version: Works 110×, Work 40×, Deed 6×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Works 51×, Deeds 44×, Work 32×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Works 91×, Work 48×, Deeds 20×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2041 across 176 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Works” 103×
  • “Work” 47×
  • “Deeds” 16×
  • “Deed” 6×

Plus 4 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 G2041 across 178 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Works” 110×
  • “Work” 40×
  • “Deed” 6×
  • “'s work” 5×
  • “A” 3×
  • “To” 2×

Plus 12 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 G2041 across 163 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Works” 51×
  • “Deeds” 44×
  • “Work” 32×
  • “Actions” 6×
  • “Deed” 6×
  • “Action” 5×
  • “Has done” 3×
  • “He did” 2×
  • “Task” 2×
  • “Workmanship” 2×

Plus 10 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 3 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2041 across 189 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Works” 91×
  • “Work” 48×
  • “Deeds” 20×
  • “Deed” 7×
  • “A” 6×
  • “Of” 5×
  • “In” 3×
  • “By” 2×
  • “The” 2×

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. business, employment, that which any one is occupied
  2. any product whatever, any thing accomplished by hand, art, industry, or mind
  3. an act, deed, thing done: the idea of working is emphasised in opp. to that which is less than work

Word origin

Origin: from a primary (but obsolete) ergo (to work)

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 12:35,3

From ἔργω ergō (a primary but obsolete word; to work ); toil (as an effort or occupation); by implication an act : - deed doing labour work.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 6 distinct written forms G2041 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἔργα érga Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Matthew 5:16 58
ἔργων érgōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter Matthew 11:19 42
ἔργον érgon Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 26:10 38
ἔργοις érgois Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter Luke 11:48 13
ἔργῳ érgō Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter Luke 24:19 10
ἔργου érgou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter John 10:33 8

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2041, 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.

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word εργον appears 420 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 384 verses in 31 books.

420
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
384
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
31 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 31 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2041) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 384. 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 (G2041) 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.