κῆνσος
census tax
‘census tax’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
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.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine 3 times (75%)
- Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G2778 appears — 4 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 17:25 κῆνσον n acc sg masc He said, "Yes." When he came into the house, Jesus anticipated him, saying, "What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the earth receive toll or tribute? From their children, or from strangers?"
- Matthew 22:17 κῆνσον n acc sg masc Tell us therefore, what do you think? Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?"
- Matthew 22:19 κήνσου n gen sg masc Show me the tax money." They brought to him a denarius.
Mark 1 verse
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.
“census tax” is the headline sense of the Greek noun κηνσος (kēnsos). It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Matthew, which alone accounts for 75% of its uses. First canonically at Matthew 17:25, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2778 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 4 verses · 100%
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: Tribute 4×
- American Standard Version: Tribute 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Taxes 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Poll tax 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2778 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2778 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2778 across 4 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2778 across 4 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.
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.
- census (among the Romans…
- the coin with which the tax is paid, tribute money
Word origin
Origin: of Latin origin
Of Latin origin; properly an enrolment (census) that is (by implication) a tax : - tribute.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G2778 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κῆνσον kē̂nson | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 17:25 | 3 |
| κήνσου kḗnsou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 22:19 | 1 |
