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ἔρημος

desolate

G2048 Strong's Greek
érēmos Transliteration
/er'-ay-mos/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 48 appearances

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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.

The Greek word ερημος centers on the idea of “desolate.” Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 3:1. Spanning 48 verses in 9 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Greek New Testament. Related forms include ερημια, ερημοω and ηρεμος. 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
desert
Modern gloss
desolate
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 G2048 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 →

48
distinct verses
The word appears in 48 distinct verses.
9 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 9 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 3:1
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 3:1.
Revelation 17:3
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 17:3.
#322
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 322 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 48 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 32 · 67%
  • Acts 9 · 19%
  • Pauline Epistles 2 · 4%
  • General Epistles 2 · 4%
  • Revelation 3 · 6%

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 48 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 32 verses · 67%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 19 verses · 40%
  • Johannine 8 verses · 17%
  • Revelation 3 verses · 6%
  • Pauline corpus 2 verses · 4%
  • Hebrews 2 verses · 4%

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: Wilderness 32×, Desert 12×, Desolate 4×
  • American Standard Version: Wilderness 31×, Desert 10×, Deserts 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Wilderness 31×, Solitary 6×, Desolate 4×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Wilderness 34×, Desolate 11×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2048 across 50 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Wilderness” 32×
  • “Desert” 12×
  • “Desolate” 4×

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 G2048 across 48 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Wilderness” 31×
  • “Desert” 10×
  • “Deserts” 3×
  • “Desolate” 2×

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 G2048 across 47 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Wilderness” 31×
  • “Solitary” 6×
  • “Desolate” 4×
  • “Desert” 2×

Plus 4 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 G2048 across 48 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Wilderness” 34×
  • “Desolate” 11×

Plus 3 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.

  1. solitary, lonely, desolate, uninhabited

Word origin

Origin: of uncertain affinity

TDNT: 12:57,3

Of uncertain affinity; lonesome that is (by implication) waste (usually as a noun G5561 being implied): - desert desolate solitary wilderness.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms G2048 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἐρήμῳ erḗmō Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 3:1 24
ἔρημον érēmon Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 4:1 13
ἐρήμοις erḗmois Adjective, Dative, Plural, Feminine Luke 1:80 3
ἔρημος érēmos Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Acts 1:20 3
ἐρήμου erḗmou Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Feminine John 11:54 2
ἔρημός érēmós Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 14:15 2
ἐρήμους erḗmous Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Luke 8:29 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2048, 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 ερημος appears 340 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 318 verses in 30 books.

340
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
318
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
30 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 30 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2048) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 318. 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 (G2048) 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.