κρούω
to knock
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Genitive, Singular, Masculine 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Dative, Singular, Masculine 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (11%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 9 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G2925 appears — 9 distinct verses across 4 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 2 verses
Luke 4 verses
- Luke 11:9 κρούετε pres act impv 2pl "I tell you, keep asking, and it will be given you. Keep seeking, and you will find. Keep knocking, and it will be opened to you.
- Luke 11:10 κρούοντι pres act ptcp dat sg masc For everyone who asks receives. He who seeks finds. To him who knocks it will be opened.
- Luke 12:36 κρούσαντος aor act ptcp gen sg masc Be like men watching for their lord, when he returns from the marriage feast; that, when he comes and knocks, they may immediately open to him.
- Luke 13:25 κρούειν pres act inf When once the master of the house has risen up, and has shut the door, and you begin to stand outside, and to knock at the door, saying, 'Lord, Lord, open to us!' then he will answer and tell you, 'I don't know you or where you come from.'
Acts 2 verses
Revelation 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.
At its core, κρουω (kroúō) means “to knock.” Debuting at Matthew 7:7, it then recurs through the corpus. With 9 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Luke (44% of all occurrences). Dig into 9-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2925 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,140
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,140 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Gospels 6 verses · 67%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 6 verses · 67%
- Johannine 1 verse · 11%
- Revelation 1 verse · 11%
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: Knock 4×, Knocketh 3×
- American Standard Version: Knock 4×, Knocketh 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Knock 3×, Knocks 3×, Knocking 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Knock 3×, Knocking 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2925 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 G2925 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 G2925 across 9 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 G2925 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 1 sense 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.
- to knock: at the door
Word origin
Origin: apparently a primary verb
Apparently a primary verb; to rap : - knock.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G2925 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| κρούετε kroúete | Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | Matthew 7:7 | 2 |
| κρούοντι kroúonti | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Dative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 7:8 | 2 |
| κρούσαντος kroúsantos | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Luke 12:36 | 2 |
| κρούειν kroúein | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Luke 13:25 | 1 |
| κρούω kroúō | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Revelation 3:20 | 1 |
| κρούων kroúōn | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Acts 12:16 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word κρουω appears 2 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 2 verses in 2 books.
- 2
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 2
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 19:22 κρούω
- Song of Solomon 5:2 κρούω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2925) 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.
- Judges 19:22 κρούω As they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain base fellows, beset the house round about, beating at the door; and they spoke to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man who came into your house, that we may know him.
- Song of Solomon 5:2 κρούω I was asleep, but my heart was awake. It is the voice of my beloved who knocks: Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled; For my head is filled with dew, My hair with the dampness of the night.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2925) 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.
