κακολογέω
to revile
‘to revile’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
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).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
1 verse where G2551 appears in the Present tense 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.
κακολογεω (kakologéō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to revile.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. Mark dominates its distribution — 2 of 4 verses. It first appears in Matthew 15:4. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2551 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.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 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%
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: He that curseth 1×, Spake evil 1×, Speak evil 1×
- American Standard Version: He that speaketh evil 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Curses 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Speaking evil of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2551 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2551 across 4 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 G2551 across 4 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2551 across 4 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 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.
- to speak evil of, revile, abuse, one
- to curse
Word origin
Derived from κακος (kakós) (G2556) — evil.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G2551 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κακολογῶν kakologō̂n | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 15:4 | 2 |
| κακολογοῦντες kakologoûntes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 19:9 | 1 |
| κακολογῆσαί kakologē̂saí | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | Mark 9:39 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2551, 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
- ηττον hḗtton G2276 less
- κακια kakía G2549 malice
- κακοηθεια kakoḗtheia G2550 maliciousness
- κακοπαθεια kakopátheia G2552 suffering
- κακοποιος kakopoiós G2555 evildoer
- κακουργος kakoûrgos G2557 malefactor
- κακουχεω kakouchéō G2558 to treat ill
- κακοω kakóō G2559 to oppress
- κακως kakōs G2560 miserable
- χειρων cheírōn G5501 worse
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word κακολογεω 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
- Exodus 21:16 κακολογέω
- 1 Samuel 3:13 κακολογέω
- Proverbs 20:9 κακολογέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2551) 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.
- Exodus 21:16 κακολογέω "Anyone who kidnaps someone and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.
- Exodus 22:27 κακολογέω for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What would he sleep in? It will happen, when he cries to me, that I will hear, for I am gracious.
- 1 Samuel 3:13 κακολογέω For I have told him that I will judge his house forever, for the iniquity which he knew, because his sons did bring a curse on themselves, and he didn't restrain them.
- Proverbs 20:9 κακολογέω Who can say, "I have made my heart pure. I am clean and without sin?"
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2551) 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.
