ἰχθύς
fish
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-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
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where G2486 appears in the Genitive case in the Book of Mark. 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.
Mark
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.
ιχθυς — transliterated ichthýs — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “fish.” It first appears in Matthew 7:10. The Greek New Testament uses it across 18 verses — uncommon. More than a third of its appearances fall in Luke. Related forms include ιχθυδιον. See the sense tree, 18-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2486 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 →
- 18
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 18 distinct verses.
- 5 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 5 of 27 New Testament books.
- #622
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 622 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 18 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 18 distinct verses.
- Gospels 17 verses · 94%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 6 verses · 33%
- Johannine 3 verses · 17%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 6%
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: Fishes 15×, Fish 4×
- American Standard Version: Fishes 14×, Fish 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fish 19×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fish 20×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2486 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2486 across 20 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 G2486 across 19 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2486 across 22 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.
- a fish
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain affinity
Of uncertain affinity; a fish : - fish.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G2486 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἰχθύας ichthýas | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 14:17 | 7 |
| ἰχθύων ichthýōn | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Mark 6:43 | 7 |
| ἰχθύος ichthýos | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Luke 11:11 | 2 |
| ἰχθὺν ichthỳn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 7:10 | 2 |
| ἰχθύες ichthýes | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 9:13 | 1 |
| ἰχθύν ichthýn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Luke 11:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2486, 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 ιχθυς appears 25 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 23 verses in 15 books.
- 25
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 23
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 15 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 15 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 1:26 ἰχθύς
- Exodus 7:18 ἰχθύς
- Numbers 11:5 ἰχθύς
- Deuteronomy 4:18 ἰχθύς
- 1 Kings 5:13 ἰχθύς
- Ezra 23:16 ἰχθύς
- Job 12:8 ἰχθύς
- Psalms 8:9 ἰχθῦς
- Ecclesiastes 9:12 ἰχθύς
- Isaiah 50:2 ἰχθύς
- Ezekiel 29:4 ἰχθύς
- Daniel 2:38 ἰχθύς
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2486) 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 1:26 ἰχθύς God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
- Genesis 1:28 ἰχθύς God blessed them. God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
- Genesis 9:2 ἰχθύς The fear of you and the dread of you will be on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the sky. Everything that the ground teems with, and all the fish of the sea are delivered into your hand.
- Exodus 7:18 ἰχθύς The fish that are in the river shall die, and the river shall become foul; and the Egyptians shall loathe to drink water from the river."'"
- Exodus 7:21 ἰχθύς The fish that were in the river died; and the river became foul, and the Egyptians couldn't drink water from the river; and the blood was throughout all the land of Egypt.
- Numbers 11:5 ἰχθύς We remember the fish, which we ate in Egypt for nothing; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic:
- Deuteronomy 4:18 ἰχθύς the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth;
- 1 Kings 5:13 ἰχθύς King Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men.
- Ezra 23:16 ἰχθύς
- Job 12:8 ἰχθύς Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach you; The fish of the sea shall declare to you.
- Psalms 8:9 ἰχθῦς Yahweh, our Lord, How majestic is your name in all the earth!
- Psalms 104:29 ἰχθύς You hide your face: they are troubled; You take away their breath: they die, and return to the dust.
- Ecclesiastes 9:12 ἰχθύς For man also doesn't know his time. As the fish that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, even so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falls suddenly on them.
- Isaiah 50:2 ἰχθύς Why, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it can't redeem? or have I no power to deliver? Behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness: their fish stink, because there is no water, and die for thirst.
- Ezekiel 29:4 ἰχθύς I will put hooks in your jaws, and I will cause the fish of your rivers to stick to your scales; and I will bring you up out of the midst of your rivers, with all the fish of your rivers which stick to your scales.
- Ezekiel 29:5 ἰχθύς I will cast you forth into the wilderness, you and all the fish of your rivers: you shall fall on the open field; you shall not be brought together, nor gathered; I have given you for food to the animals of the earth and to the birds of the sky.
- Ezekiel 38:20 ἰχθύς so that the fish of the sea, and the birds of the sky, and the animals of the field, and all creeping things who creep on the earth, and all the men who are on the surface of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground.
- Ezekiel 47:9 ἰχθύς It shall happen, that every living creature which swarms, in every place where the rivers come, shall live; and there shall be a very great multitude of fish; for these waters are come there, and [the waters of the sea] shall be healed, and everything shall live wherever the river comes.
- Ezekiel 47:10 ἰχθύς It shall happen, that fishermen shall stand by it: from En Gedi even to En Eglaim shall be a place for the spreading of nets; their fish shall be after their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many.
- Daniel 2:38 ἰχθύς and wherever the children of men dwell, the animals of the field and the birds of the sky has he given into your hand, and has made you to rule over them all: you are the head of gold.
- Hosea 4:3 ἰχθύς Therefore the land will mourn, And everyone who dwells therein will waste away. All living things in her, Even the animals of the field and the birds of the sky; Yes, the fish of the sea also die.
- Habakkuk 1:14 ἰχθύς and make men like the fish of the sea, like the creeping things, that have no ruler over them?
- Zephaniah 1:3 ἰχθύς I will sweep away man and animal. I will sweep away the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea, and the heaps of rubble with the wicked. I will cut off man from the surface of the earth, says Yahweh.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2486) 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.
