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κεφαλή

head

‘head’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G2776 Strong's Greek
kephalḗ Transliteration
/kef-al-ay'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 75 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.

κεφαλη — transliterated kephalḗ — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “head.” It first appears in Matthew 5:36. With 67 verses in 11 books, it is a moderately common word in the Greek New Testament. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. From the same root come κεφαλαιον and κεφαλις. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
head
Modern gloss
head
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G2776 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 →

67
distinct verses
The word appears in 67 distinct verses.
11 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 11 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 5:36
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 5:36.
Revelation 19:12
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 19:12.
#228
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 228 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 67 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 32 · 48%
  • Acts 5 · 7%
  • Pauline Epistles 13 · 19%
  • General Epistles 1 · 1%
  • Revelation 16 · 24%

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 67 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 32 verses · 48%
  • Johannine 21 verses · 31%
  • Revelation 16 verses · 24%
  • Pauline corpus 13 verses · 19%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 12 verses · 18%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 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: Head 55×, Heads 18×
  • American Standard Version: Head 52×, Heads 18×, Of 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Head 49×, Heads 19×, Cornerstone 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Head 56×, Heads 18×, Of 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2776 across 76 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Head” 55×
  • “Heads” 18×

Plus 3 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 G2776 across 76 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Head” 52×
  • “Heads” 18×
  • “Of” 2×

Plus 4 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 G2776 across 71 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Head” 49×
  • “Heads” 19×
  • “Cornerstone” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 G2776 across 80 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Head” 56×
  • “Heads” 18×
  • “Of” 3×

Plus 3 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. the head, both of men and often of animals. Since the loss of the head destroys life, this word is used in the phrases…
  2. metaph. anything supreme, chief, prominent

Word origin

Origin: from the primary kapto (in the sense of seizing)

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 14:13,4

Probably from the primary word κάπτω kaptō (in the sense of seizing ); the head (as the part most readily taken hold of) literally or figuratively : - head.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 10 distinct written forms G2776 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
κεφαλὴν kephalḕn Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 6:17 24
κεφαλῆς kephalē̂s Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Matthew 10:30 13
κεφαλὰς kephalàs Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Matthew 27:39 12
κεφαλὴ kephalḕ Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 14:11 10
κεφαλήν kephalḗn Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Luke 7:46 6
κεφαλῇ kephalē̂ Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 5:36 4
κεφαλαὶ kephalaì Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine Revelation 9:17 3
κεφαλάς kephalás Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Revelation 9:19 1
κεφαλή kephalḗ Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Ephesians 4:15 1
κεφαλῶν kephalō̂n Noun, Genitive, Plural, Feminine Revelation 13:3 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2776, 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

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


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word κεφαλη appears 334 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 309 verses in 31 books.

334
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
309
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
31 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 31 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2776) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 309. 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 (G2776) 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.