κεῖμαι
to lie
‘to lie’ is one of 5 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Middle or Passive deponent
- Middle/passive in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G2749 appears in the Book of 1 Thessalonians — 1 distinct verse. 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.
1 Thessalonians
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.
κειμαι (keîmai) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to lie.” Ranging over 5 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Spanning 23 verses in 10 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. John dominates its distribution — 7 of 23 verses. Scripture first uses it in Matthew 3:10. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2749 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 →
- 23
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 23 distinct verses.
- 10 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 10 of 27 New Testament books.
- #563
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 563 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 23 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 23 distinct verses.
- Gospels 15 verses · 65%
- Johannine 10 verses · 43%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 5 verses · 22%
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 22%
- Revelation 2 verses · 9%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 4%
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: Laid 4×, Lying 4×, Is laid 3×
- American Standard Version: Lieth 5×, Lying 5×, Set 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lying 4×, Lies ready 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lying 3×, Is 2×, Lies 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2749 across 27 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 G2749 across 26 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 13 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 G2749 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 17 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 G2749 across 26 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 17 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 5 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.
- of an infant
- of one buried
- of things that quietly cover some spot
- of things put or set in any place, in ref. to which we often use "to stand"
- metaph.
Word origin
Origin: middle voice of a primary verb
Middle voice of a primary verb; to lie outstretched (literally or figuratively): - be (appointed laid up made set) lay lie. Compare G5087 .
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms G2749 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2749, 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
- κοιμαω koimáō G2837 to sleep
- κοιτη koítē G2845 bed
- κωμη kṓmē G2968 village
- κωμος kōmos G2970 carousal
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word κειμαι appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 5 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Joshua 4:6 κεῖμαι
- 2 Samuel 13:32 κεῖμαι
- Ezra 6:1 κεῖμαι
- Isaiah 9:3 κεῖμαι
- Jeremiah 24:1 κεῖμαι
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2749) 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.
- Joshua 4:6 κεῖμαι that this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask in time to come, saying, What do you mean by these stones?
- 2 Samuel 13:32 κεῖμαι Jonadab, the son of Shimeah, David's brother, answered, Don't let my lord suppose that they have killed all the young men the king's sons; for Amnon only is dead; for by the appointment of Absalom this has been determined from the day that he forced his sister Tamar.
- Ezra 6:1 κεῖμαι Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the house of the archives, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon.
- Isaiah 9:3 κεῖμαι You have multiplied the nation, you have increased their joy: they joy before you according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.
- Isaiah 30:33 κεῖμαι For a Topheth is prepared of old; yes, for the king it is made ready; he has made it deep and large; the pile of it is fire and much wood; the breath of Yahweh, like a stream of sulfur, does kindle it.
- Jeremiah 24:1 κεῖμαι Yahweh shown me, and, behold, two baskets of figs set before the temple of Yahweh, after that Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and the princes of Judah, with the craftsmen and smiths, from Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2749) 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.
