ἅλας
salt
‘salt’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Nominative-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
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter 6 times (75%)
- Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter 1 time (13%)
- Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G217 appears — 4 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.
Matthew 1 verse
Mark 1 verse
Luke 1 verse
Colossians 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.
αλας (hálas) is a Greek noun most often rendered “salt.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. It concentrates in Matthew, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. It first appears in Matthew 5:13. Its lexical range runs to 4 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G217 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 verses · 75%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 25%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 25%
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: Salt 8×
- American Standard Version: Salt 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Salt 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Salt 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G217 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G217 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G217 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G217 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 4 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.
- salt with which food is seasoned and sacrifices are sprinkled
- those kinds of saline matter used to fertilise arable land
- salt is a symbol of lasting concord…
- wisdom and grace exhibited in speech
Word origin
Derived from αλς (háls) (G251) — salt.
From G251 ; salt ; figuratively prudence : - salt.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G217 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἅλα hála | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Mark 9:50 | 5 |
| ἅλας hálas | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Matthew 5:13 | 2 |
| ἅλατι hálati | Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter | Colossians 4:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G217, 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
- αιγιαλος aigialós G123 shore
- αλιευς halieús G231 fisherman
- αλιζω halízō G233 to salt
- αλυκος halykós G252 salt
- θαλασσα thálassa G2281 sea
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
