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λαός

people

also: people group, tribe, nation fuller range ↓

G2992 Strong's Greek
laós Transliteration
/lah-os'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 143 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.

The Greek noun λαος centers on the idea of “people.” Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 1:21. Spanning 139 verses in 14 books, it ranks among the common words of the Greek New Testament. Acts dominates its distribution — 47 of 139 verses. Lexicons map it across 2 senses — beyond “people” it also covers “people group”, “tribe”, and “nation”. Dig into 139-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
people
Modern gloss
people
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 G2992 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 →

139
distinct verses
The word appears in 139 distinct verses.
14 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 14 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 1:21
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 1:21.
Revelation 21:3
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 21:3.
#115
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 115 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 139 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 56 · 40%
  • Acts 47 · 34%
  • Pauline Epistles 11 · 8%
  • General Epistles 16 · 12%
  • Revelation 9 · 6%

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 139 distinct verses.

  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 83 verses · 60%
  • Gospels 56 verses · 40%
  • Johannine 12 verses · 9%
  • Hebrews 12 verses · 9%
  • Pauline corpus 11 verses · 8%
  • Revelation 9 verses · 6%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 3%

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: People 138×, People's 2×, Peoples 2×
  • American Standard Version: People 121×, Peoples 9×, Of 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: People 129×, Peoples 5×, People’s 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: People 137×, To 8×, Of 6×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2992 across 143 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “People” 138×
  • “People's” 2×
  • “Peoples” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G2992 across 144 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “People” 121×
  • “Peoples” 9×
  • “Of” 3×
  • “Unto” 2×

Plus 9 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 G2992 across 139 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “People” 129×
  • “Peoples” 5×
  • “People’s” 2×

Plus 3 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 2 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2992 across 162 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “People” 137×
  • “To” 8×
  • “Of” 6×
  • “Peoples” 5×
  • “A” 2×
  • “By” 2×

Plus 2 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. a people, people group, tribe, nation, all those who are of the same stock and language
  2. of a great part of the population gathered together anywhere

Word origin

Origin: apparently a primary word

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 04:29,5

Apparently a primary word; a people (in general; thus differing from G1218 which denotes one´ s own populace): - people.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 10 distinct written forms G2992 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
λαοῦ laoû Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Matthew 2:4 38
λαῷ laō̂ Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 4:23 26
λαὸν laòn Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 1:21 24
λαόν laón Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 2:6 21
λαὸς laòs Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 4:16 20
λαός laós Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Acts 5:13 5
λαοὶ laoì Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Acts 4:25 3
λαῶν laō̂n Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Luke 2:31 3
λαοῖς laoîs Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Acts 4:27 2
λαοί laoí Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Romans 15:11 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2992, 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

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word λαος appears 1,696 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1,499 verses in 37 books.

1,696
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
1,499
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
37 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 37 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2992) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 1,499. 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 (G2992) 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.