κάρφος
chaff
‘chaff’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
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.
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G2595 appears — 5 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Matthew 3 verses
- Matthew 7:3 κάρφος n acc sg neut Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye?
- Matthew 7:4 κάρφος n acc sg neut Or how will you tell your brother, 'Let me remove the speck from your eye;' and behold, the beam is in your own eye?
- Matthew 7:5 κάρφος n acc sg neut You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 6:41 κάρφος n acc sg neut Why do you see the speck of chaff that is in your brother's eye, but don't consider the beam that is in your own eye?
- Luke 6:42 κάρφος κάρφος n acc sg neut n acc sg neut Or how can you tell your brother, 'Brother, let me remove the speck of chaff that is in your eye,' when you yourself don't see the beam that is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam from your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck of chaff that is in your brother's eye.
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, καρφος (kárphos) means “chaff.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. Its uses cluster heavily in Matthew (60% of all occurrences). Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The King James Version usually renders it “mote,” while modern versions prefer “speck” (Berean Standard Bible) and “speck of wood” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2595 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 40%
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: Mote 5×
- American Standard Version: Mote 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Speck 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Speck of wood 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2595 across 6 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 G2595 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2595 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2595 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a dry stalk or twig, a straw
- chaff
Word origin
Origin: from karpho (to wither)
From κάρφω karpho (to wither ); a dry twig or straw : - mote.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word καρφος 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
- Genesis 8:11 κάρφος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2595) 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 (G2595) 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.
