λαγχάνω
to cast lots
‘to cast lots’ is one of 2 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
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Case
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Dative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural 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 G2975 appears — 4 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.
Luke 1 verse
John 1 verse
Acts 1 verse
2 Peter 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.
The Greek verb λαγχανω centers on the idea of “to cast lots.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. Luke dominates its distribution — 1 of 4 verses. First canonically at Luke 1:9, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. 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 G2975 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.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 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 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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 50%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 50%
- Johannine 1 verse · 25%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 25%
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: Cast lots 1×, Had obtained 1×, Have obtained 1×
- American Standard Version: 's office his lot was 1×, Cast lots 1×, Have obtained 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Have received 1×, He was chosen by lot 1×, Let us cast lots 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Having received 1×, He came up by lot 1×, Received 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2975 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2975 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2975 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2975 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to receive by divine allotment, obtain
- to cast lots, determine by lot
Word origin
Origin: a prolonged form of a primary verb, which is only used as an alternate in certain tenses
A prolonged form of a primary verb which is only used as an alternate in certain tenses; to lot that is determine (by implication receive ) especially by lot : - his lot be cast lots obtain.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G2975 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| λάχωμεν láchōmen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural | John 19:24 | 1 |
| λαχοῦσιν lachoûsin | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Dative, Plural, Masculine | 2 Peter 1:1 | 1 |
| ἔλαχε élache | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 1:9 | 1 |
| ἔλαχεν élachen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Acts 1:17 | 1 |
