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ἀγάπη

love

also: brotherly love, affection, good will, benevolence fuller range ↓

G26 Strong's Greek
agápē Transliteration
/ag-ah'-pay/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 116 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.

αγαπη — transliterated agápē — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “love.” “charity” is the historic King James Version rendering; modern versions use “love.” See the renderings breakdown. The Greek New Testament uses it across 106 verses — common. Debuting at Matthew 24:12, it then recurs through the corpus. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses; alongside “love” it spans “brotherly love”, “affection”, and “good will”. See the sense tree, 106-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
charity
Modern gloss
love
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 G26 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 →

106
distinct verses
The word appears in 106 distinct verses.
24 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 24 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 24:12
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 24:12.
Revelation 2:19
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 2:19.
#143
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 143 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 106 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 8 · 8%
  • Acts 0 · 0%
  • Pauline Epistles 71 · 67%
  • General Epistles 25 · 24%
  • Revelation 2 · 2%

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 106 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 71 verses · 67%
  • Johannine 25 verses · 24%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 23 verses · 22%
  • Gospels 8 verses · 8%
  • Hebrews 2 verses · 2%
  • Revelation 2 verses · 2%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 1%

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: Love 84×, Charity 24×
  • American Standard Version: Love 106×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Love 111×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Love 112×, Of 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G26 across 116 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Love” 84×
  • “Charity” 24×

Plus 8 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G26 across 115 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Love” 106×

Plus 9 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 G26 across 115 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Love” 111×

Plus 4 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.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G26 across 120 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Love” 112×
  • “Of” 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 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. brotherly love, affection, good will, love, benevolence
  2. love feasts

Word origin

Derived from αγαπαω (agapáō) (G25) — to love.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 01:21,5

From G25 ; love that is affection or benevolence ; specifically (plural) a love feast : - (feast of) charity ([-ably]) dear love.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 5 distinct written forms G26 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἀγάπη agápē Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 24:12 36
ἀγάπην agápēn Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Luke 11:42 33
ἀγάπῃ agápē Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine John 15:9 28
ἀγάπης agápēs Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Romans 8:35 18
ἀγάπαις agápais Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine Jude 1:12 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G26, 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

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αγαπη appears 15 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 14 verses in 4 books.

15
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
14
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
4 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G26) 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 (G26) 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.