ἐρέω
to speak
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Perfect-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
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Perfect
- A completed past action with continuing present results.
- Pluperfect
- A past action completed before another past point (“had written”).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G2046 appears in the Book of Acts — 7 distinct verses. 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.
Acts
- Acts 2:16 εἰρημένον perf pass ptcp nom sg neut attic But this is what has been spoken through the prophet Joel:
- Acts 8:24 εἰρήκατε perf act ind 2pl attic Simon answered, "Pray for me to the Lord, that none of the things which you have spoken happen to me."
- Acts 13:34 εἴρηκεν perf act ind 3sg attic "Concerning that he raised him up from the dead, now no more to return to corruption, he has spoken thus: 'I will give you the holy and sure blessings of David.'
- Acts 13:40 εἰρημένον perf pass ptcp acc sg neut attic Beware therefore, lest that come on you which is spoken in the prophets:
- Acts 17:28 εἰρήκασιν perf act ind 3pl attic 'For in him we live, and move, and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.'
- Acts 20:38 εἰρήκει plup act ind 3sg attic sorrowing most of all because of the word which he had spoken, that they should see his face no more. And they accompanied him to the ship.
- Acts 23:5 ἐρεῖς fut act ind 2sg Paul said, "I didn't know, brothers, that he was high priest. For it is written, 'You shall not speak evil of a ruler of your people.'"
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, ερεω (eréō) means “to speak.” Translators differ — “say” in the King James Version, then “was spoken” (Berean Standard Bible), as the renderings breakdown shows. With 96 verses in 13 books, it is a moderately common word in the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Matthew (31% of all occurrences). First canonically at Matthew 1:22, it enters the text early. 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 G2046 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 →
- 96
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 96 distinct verses.
- 13 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 13 of 27 New Testament books.
- #178
- by frequency
- Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 178 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 96 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 96 distinct verses.
- Gospels 57 verses · 59%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 26 verses · 27%
- Pauline corpus 20 verses · 21%
- Johannine 11 verses · 11%
- Hebrews 6 verses · 6%
- Revelation 5 verses · 5%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 1%
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: Say 9×, Shall we say 6×, He said 3×
- American Standard Version: Say 10×, Shall we say 6×, Will say 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Was spoken 9×, Shall we say 6×, Was said 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2046 across 75 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 29 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2046 across 74 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 32 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 G2046 across 96 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 47 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.
- to utter, speak, say
Word origin
Derived from ρεω (rhéō) (G4483) — to utter.
Forms in the corpus
The 26 distinct written forms G2046 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2046, 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
- επω épō G2036 to say
- ερευναω ereunáō G2045 to search
- ερωταω erōtáō G2065 to ask
- ιρις îris G2463 rainbow
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 10 — 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 ερεω appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 1:31 ερεω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2046) 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.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2046) 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.
