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καλός

good

G2570 Strong's Greek
kalós Transliteration
/kal-os'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 100 appearances

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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.

καλος — transliterated kalós — is a Greek adjective carrying the sense “good.” It first appears in Matthew 3:10. With 89 verses in 16 books, it is a moderately common word in the Greek New Testament. From the same root come καλλιον, καλοδιδασκαλος and καλοποιεω. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
better
Modern gloss
good
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 G2570 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 →

89
distinct verses
The word appears in 89 distinct verses.
16 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 16 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 3:10
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 3:10.
1 Peter 4:10
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in 1 Peter 4:10.
#165
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 165 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 89 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 42 · 47%
  • Acts 1 · 1%
  • Pauline Epistles 36 · 40%
  • General Epistles 10 · 11%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 89 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 42 verses · 47%
  • Pauline corpus 36 verses · 40%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 8 verses · 9%
  • Johannine 5 verses · 6%
  • Hebrews 5 verses · 6%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 5 verses · 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: Good 69×, Is good 12×, Better 6×
  • American Standard Version: Good 72×, Is good 11×, Goodly 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Good 64×, Better 9×, Noble 4×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Good 75×, Is good 13×, Better 6×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2570 across 101 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Good” 69×
  • “Is good” 12×
  • “Better” 6×
  • “Goodly” 2×
  • “Honest” 2×
  • “Meet” 2×

Plus 8 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 1 further occurrence.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G2570 across 98 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Good” 72×
  • “Is good” 11×
  • “Goodly” 2×
  • “Meet” 2×

Plus 11 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 1 further occurrence.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G2570 across 99 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Good” 64×
  • “Better” 9×
  • “Noble” 4×
  • “Beautiful” 3×
  • “Fine” 3×
  • “Right” 3×
  • “Is right” 2×

Plus 11 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 2 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2570 across 104 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Good” 75×
  • “Is good” 13×
  • “Better” 6×
  • “Good things” 2×
  • “Is” 2×

Plus 6 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.

  1. beautiful, handsome, excellent, eminent, choice, surpassing, precious, useful, suitable, commendable, admirable

Word origin

Origin: of uncertain affinity

Part of speech: Adjective TDNT: 11:56,4

Of uncertain affinity; properly beautiful but chiefly (figuratively) good (literally or morally) that is valuable or virtuous (for appearance or use and thus distinguished from G18 which is properly intrinsic ): - X better fair good (-ly) honest meet well worthy.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 17 distinct written forms G2570 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
καλὸν kalòn Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 12:33 40
καλόν kalón Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 17:4 12
καλὴν kalḕn Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 13:8 9
καλὰ kalà Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Matthew 5:16 7
καλῶν kalō̂n Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Neuter Titus 2:7 6
καλὸς kalòs Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine John 10:11 4
καλοῖς kaloîs Adjective, Dative, Plural, Neuter 1 Timothy 5:10 3
καλοὺς kaloùs Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 7:17 3
καλοῦ kaloû Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Neuter John 10:33 3
καλός kalós Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine John 10:11 3
καλήν kalḗn Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Mark 4:8 2
καλῆς kalē̂s Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Feminine 1 Timothy 4:6 2
καλῇ kalē̂ Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine Luke 8:15 2
Καλοὺς Kaloùs Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Acts 27:8 1
Καλὸν Kalòn Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Luke 14:34 1
καλοὶ kaloì Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 Peter 4:10 1
καλῷ kalō̂ Adjective, Dative, Singular, Neuter Galatians 4:18 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2570, 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

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word καλος appears 170 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 163 verses in 29 books.

170
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
163
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
29 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 29 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2570) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 163. 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 (G2570) 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.