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καιρός

time

‘time’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G2540 Strong's Greek
kairós Transliteration
/kahee-ros'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 85 appearances

Compare with another word →

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, καιρος (kairós) means “time.” It first appears in Matthew 8:29. It turns up in 80 verses across 19 books, a moderately common footprint. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Dig into 80-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
always
Modern gloss
time
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G2540 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 →

80
distinct verses
The word appears in 80 distinct verses.
19 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 19 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 8:29
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 8:29.
Revelation 22:10
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:10.
#200
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 200 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 80 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 29 · 36%
  • Acts 9 · 11%
  • Pauline Epistles 29 · 36%
  • General Epistles 8 · 10%
  • Revelation 5 · 6%

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 80 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 29 verses · 36%
  • Pauline corpus 29 verses · 36%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 21 verses · 26%
  • Johannine 7 verses · 9%
  • Revelation 5 verses · 6%
  • Hebrews 4 verses · 5%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 5%

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: Time 51×, Times 11×, Season 6×
  • American Standard Version: Time 37×, Season 15×, Seasons 7×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Time 44×, Times 9×, Appointed time 4×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Time 64×, Times 10×, Seasons 5×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2540 across 82 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Time” 51×
  • “Times” 11×
  • “Season” 6×
  • “Seasons” 4×
  • “Due season” 2×
  • “Opportunity” 2×

Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G2540 across 82 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Time” 37×
  • “Season” 15×
  • “Seasons” 7×
  • “Times” 7×
  • “Due season” 2×

Plus 14 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 G2540 across 82 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Time” 44×
  • “Times” 9×
  • “Appointed time” 4×
  • “Harvest time” 4×
  • “Proper time” 4×
  • “Seasons” 4×
  • “Age” 2×
  • “Opportunity” 2×
  • “Season” 2×

Plus 7 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 3 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2540 across 96 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Time” 64×
  • “Times” 10×
  • “Seasons” 5×
  • “In” 3×
  • “At” 2×
  • “Season” 2×
  • “The” 2×

Plus 8 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 2 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.

  1. due measure
  2. a measure of time, a larger or smaller portion of time, hence:

Word origin

Origin: of uncertain affinity

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 10:35,4

Of uncertain affinity; an occasion that is set or proper time : - X always opportunity (convenient due) season (due short while) time a while. Compare G5550 .

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 10 distinct written forms G2540 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
καιρῷ kairō̂ Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 11:25 24
καιρὸν kairòn Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Luke 1:20 19
καιρὸς kairòs Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 21:34 15
καιροῦ kairoû Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 8:29 7
καιροὺς kairoùs Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Acts 1:7 5
καιροῖς kairoîs Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 21:41 5
καιροὶ kairoì Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Luke 21:24 3
καιρῶν kairō̂n Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 16:3 3
καιρόν kairón Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Romans 13:11 2
καιρός kairós Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 26:18 2

Septuagint usage

The same Greek word καιρος appears 297 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 253 verses in 32 books.

297
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
253
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
32 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 32 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2540) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 253. 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 (G2540) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.