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κόσμος

world

‘world’ is one of 8 main senses fuller range ↓

G2889 Strong's Greek
kósmos Transliteration
/kos'-mos/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 184 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.

“world” is the headline sense of the Greek noun κοσμος (kósmos). Catalogued under 8 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. It appears 149 verses across 20 books of the Greek New Testament, among its common vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in John. Scripture first uses it in Matthew 4:8. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
adorning
Modern gloss
world
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 G2889 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 →

149
distinct verses
The word appears in 149 distinct verses.
20 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 20 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 4:8
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 4:8.
Revelation 17:8
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 17:8.
#86
by frequency
Top 100 most frequent Greek words (rank 86 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 149 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 70 · 47%
  • Acts 1 · 1%
  • Pauline Epistles 41 · 28%
  • General Epistles 34 · 23%
  • Revelation 3 · 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 149 distinct verses.

  • Johannine 77 verses · 52%
  • Gospels 70 verses · 47%
  • Pauline corpus 41 verses · 28%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 29 verses · 19%
  • Hebrews 5 verses · 3%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 4 verses · 3%
  • Revelation 3 verses · 2%

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: World 185×
  • American Standard Version: World 179×, The 5×, Of 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: World 176×, Whole world 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: World 185×, Of 9×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2889 across 187 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “World” 185×

Plus 2 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 G2889 across 191 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “World” 179×
  • “The” 5×
  • “Of” 3×

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 G2889 across 183 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “World” 176×
  • “Whole world” 2×

Plus 5 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 3 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2889 across 198 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “World” 185×
  • “Of” 9×

Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.


8 senses in Thayer's, in lexicon order

The 8 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. an apt and harmonious arrangement or constitution, order, government
  2. ornament…
  3. the world, the universe
  4. the circle of the earth, the earth
  5. the inhabitants of the earth, men, the human family
  6. the ungodly multitude; the whole mass of men alienated from God, and therefore hostile to the cause of Christ
  7. world affairs, the aggregate of things earthly
  8. any aggregate or general collection of particulars of any sort

Word origin

Derived from κομιζω (komízō) (G2865) — to care for.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 17:28,5

Probably from the base of G2865 ; orderly arrangement that is decoration ; by implication the world (in a wide or narrow sense including its inhabitants literally or figuratively [morally]): - adorning world.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 4 distinct written forms G2889 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
κόσμου kósmou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 4:8 71
κόσμον kósmon Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 16:26 45
κόσμῳ kósmō Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 18:7 36
κόσμος kósmos Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 13:38 32

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2889, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word κοσμος appears 28 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 26 verses in 9 books.

28
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
26
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
9 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 9 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2889) 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 (G2889) 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.