λευκαίνω
to whiten
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).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3021 appears in the Book of Revelation — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Revelation
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.
“to whiten” is the headline sense of the Greek verb λευκαινω (leukaínō). The Greek New Testament uses it only 2 verses. More than half of its appearances fall in Mark. Its earliest occurrence is Mark 9:3. Related forms include λευκος, λυκος and λυχνος. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3021 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Mark 1 verse 50%
- Revelation 1 verse 50%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 1 verse · 50%
- Johannine 1 verse · 50%
- Revelation 1 verse · 50%
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: White 2×
- American Standard Version: Made 1×, White 1×, Whiten them 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bleach them 1×, Made them white 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Made 1×, Make them white 1×, White 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3021 across 3 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3021 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3021 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3021 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 whiten, make white
Word origin
Derived from λευκος (leukós) (G3022) — white.
From G3022 ; to whiten : - make white whiten.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G3021 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| λευκᾶναι leukânai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | Mark 9:3 | 1 |
| ἐλεύκαναν eleúkanan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Revelation 7:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3021, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word λευκαινω appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 4 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Leviticus 13:19 λευκαίνω
- Psalms 50:9 λευκαίνω
- Isaiah 1:18 λευκαίνω
- Joel 1:7 λευκαίνω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3021) 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.
- Leviticus 13:19 λευκαίνω and in the place of the boil there is a white rising, or a bright spot, reddish-white, then it shall be shown to the priest;
- Psalms 50:9 λευκαίνω I have no need for a bull from your stall, Nor male goats from your pens.
- Isaiah 1:18 λευκαίνω "Come now, and let us reason together," says Yahweh: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
- Joel 1:7 λευκαίνω He has laid my vine waste, And stripped my fig tree. He has stripped its bark, and thrown it away. Its branches are made white.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3021) 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.
