ἀγαλλίασις
gladness
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
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine 3 times (60%)
- Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G20 appears — 5 distinct verses across 4 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.
Luke 2 verses
Acts 1 verse
Hebrews 1 verse
Jude 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.
The Greek noun αγαλλιασις centers on the idea of “gladness.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. Luke dominates its distribution — 2 of 5 verses. Debuting at Luke 1:14, it then recurs through the corpus. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G20 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,648
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,648 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 60%
- Gospels 2 verses · 40%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 20%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 20%
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: Gladness 3×
- American Standard Version: Gladness 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Joy 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Exultation 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G20 across 5 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 G20 across 5 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G20 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G20 across 5 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.
- exultation, extreme joy, gladness
Word origin
Derived from αγαλλιαω (agalliáō) (G21) — to rejoice greatly.
From G21 ; exultation ; specifically welcome : - gladness (exceeding) joy.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G20 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀγαλλιάσει agalliásei | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 1:44 | 3 |
| ἀγαλλίασις agallíasis | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 1:14 | 1 |
| ἀγαλλιάσεως agalliáseōs | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Hebrews 1:9 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αγαλλιασις appears 17 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 17 verses in 2 books.
- 17
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 17
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Psalms 29:6 ἀγαλλίασις
- Isaiah 51:11 ἀγαλλίασις
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G20) 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.
- Psalms 29:6 ἀγαλλίασις He makes them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young, wild ox.
- Psalms 41:5 ἀγαλλίασις My enemies speak evil against me: "When will he die, and his name perish?"
- Psalms 44:8 ἀγαλλίασις In God we have made our boast all day long, We will give thanks to your name forever. Selah.
- Psalms 44:16 ἀγαλλίασις At the taunt of one who reproaches and verbally abuses, Because of the enemy and the avenger.
- Psalms 46:2 ἀγαλλίασις Therefore we won't be afraid, though the earth changes, Though the mountains are shaken into the heart of the seas;
- Psalms 50:10 ἀγαλλίασις For every animal of the forest is mine, And the cattle on a thousand hills.
- Psalms 50:14 ἀγαλλίασις Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Pay your vows to the Most High.
- Psalms 62:6 ἀγαλλίασις He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress. I will not be shaken.
- Psalms 64:13 ἀγαλλίασις
- Psalms 99:2 ἀγαλλίασις Yahweh is great in Zion. He is high above all the peoples.
- Psalms 104:43 ἀγαλλίασις
- Psalms 106:22 ἀγαλλίασις Wondrous works in the land of Ham, And awesome things by the Red Sea.
- Psalms 117:15 ἀγαλλίασις
- Psalms 125:2 ἀγαλλίασις As the mountains surround Jerusalem, So Yahweh surrounds his people from this time forth and forevermore.
- Psalms 125:5 ἀγαλλίασις But as for those who turn aside to their crooked ways, Yahweh will lead them away with the workers of iniquity. Peace be on Israel.
- Psalms 131:16 ἀγαλλίασις
- Isaiah 51:11 ἀγαλλίασις The ransomed of Yahweh shall return, and come with singing to Zion; and everlasting joy shall be on their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy; [and] sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G20) 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.
