ἀληθεύω
to speak truth
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G226 appears in the Book of Ephesians — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Ephesians
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, αληθευω (alētheúō) means “to speak truth.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Galatians (50%), then Ephesians. First canonically at Galatians 4:16, it enters the text early. It shares a root with αληθης, αληθεια and αληθινος. 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 G226 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 100%
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: I tell 1×, Speaking the truth 1×, Truth 1×
- American Standard Version: Speaking truth 1×, Telling 1×, Truth 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Speaking the truth 1×, Telling you the truth 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Speaking truth 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G226 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G226 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G226 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G226 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 speak or tell the truth
Word origin
Derived from αληθης (alēthḗs) (G227) — true.
From G227 ; to be true (in doctrine and profession): - speak (tell) the truth.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G226 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀληθεύοντες alētheúontes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Ephesians 4:15 | 1 |
| ἀληθεύων alētheúōn | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Galatians 4:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G226, 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
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αληθευω appears 4 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 3 books.
- 4
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 20:16 ἀληθεύω
- Proverbs 21:3 ἀληθεύω
- Isaiah 44:26 ἀληθεύω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G226) 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.
- Genesis 20:16 ἀληθεύω To Sarah he said, "Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of silver. Behold, it is for you a covering of the eyes to all that are with you. In front of all you are vindicated."
- Genesis 42:16 ἀληθεύω Send one of you, and let him get your brother, and you shall be bound, that your words may be tested, whether there is truth in you, or else by the life of Pharaoh surely you are spies."
- Proverbs 21:3 ἀληθεύω To do righteousness and justice Is more acceptable to Yahweh than sacrifice.
- Isaiah 44:26 ἀληθεύω who confirms the word of his servant, and performs the counsel of his messengers; who says of Jerusalem, She shall be inhabited; and of the cities of Judah, They shall be built, and I will raise up the waste places of it;
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G226) 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.
