ἰδιώτης
private person
‘private person’ 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).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
2 verses where G2399 appears in the Nominative case in the Book of 1 Corinthians. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
1 Corinthians
- 1 Corinthians 14:23 ἰδιῶται n nom pl masc If therefore the whole assembly is assembled together and all speak with other languages, and unlearned or unbelieving people come in, won't they say that you are crazy?
- 1 Corinthians 14:24 ἰδιώτης n nom sg masc But if all prophesy, and someone unbelieving or unlearned comes in, he is reproved by all, and he is judged by all.
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 ιδιωτης centers on the idea of “private person.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. 1 Corinthians dominates its distribution — 3 of 5 verses. First canonically at Acts 4:13, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 4 senses. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2399 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.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 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 →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Corinthians 3 verses 60%
- Acts 1 verse 20%
- 2 Corinthians 1 verse 20%
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.
- Pauline corpus 4 verses · 80%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 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: Are unlearned 1×, I be rude 1×, Ignorant 1×
- American Standard Version: Unlearned 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is uninstructed 1×, Ordinary 1×, Polished 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ungifted 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2399 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2399 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2399 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2399 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.
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.
- a private person as opposed to a magistrate, ruler, king
- a common soldier, as opposed to a military officer
- a writer of prose as opposed to a poet
- in the NT, an unlearned, illiterate, man as opposed to the learned and educated: one who is unskilled in any art
Word origin
Derived from ιδιος (ídios) (G2398) — one's own.
From G2398 ; a private person that is (by implication) an ignoramus (compare idiot): - ignorant rude unlearned.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G2399 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἰδιώτης idiṓtēs | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | 1 Corinthians 14:24 | 2 |
| ἰδιῶται idiō̂tai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 4:13 | 2 |
| ἰδιώτου idiṓtou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | 1 Corinthians 14:16 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ιδιωτης 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
- Proverbs 6:8 ἰδιώτης
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2399) 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 (G2399) 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.
