κακοῦργος
malefactor
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
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.
Every verse where G2557 appears in the Book of Luke — 3 distinct verses. 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.
Luke
- Luke 23:32 κακοῦργοι adj nom pl masc There were also others, two criminals, led with him to be put to death.
- Luke 23:33 κακούργους adj acc pl masc When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified him there with the criminals, one on the right and the other on the left.
- Luke 23:39 κακούργων adj gen pl masc One of the criminals who was hanged insulted him, saying, "If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!"
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.
“malefactor” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective κακουργος (kakoûrgos). The Greek New Testament uses it only 4 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Luke. Scripture first uses it in Luke 23:32. It shares a root with κακος, ηττον and κακια. See the sense tree, 4-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2557 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.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 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 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) 3 verses · 75%
- Pauline corpus 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: Malefactors 3×
- American Standard Version: Malefactors 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Criminals 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Criminals 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2557 across 4 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 G2557 across 4 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2557 across 4 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2557 across 4 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.
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 malefactor
Word origin
Derived from κακος (kakós) (G2556) — evil.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G2557 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κακούργους kakoúrgous | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 23:33 | 1 |
| κακούργων kakoúrgōn | Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Luke 23:39 | 1 |
| κακοῦργοι kakoûrgoi | Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 23:32 | 1 |
| κακοῦργος kakoûrgos | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | 2 Timothy 2:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2557, 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
- κακολογεω kakologéō G2551 to revile
- κακοπαθεια kakopátheia G2552 suffering
- κακοποιος kakopoiós G2555 evildoer
- 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 κακουργος 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 21:15 κακοῦργος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2557) 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 (G2557) 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.
