ἀναγκάζω
to compel
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 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 G315 appears — 9 distinct verses across 6 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 1 verse
Mark 1 verse
Luke 1 verse
Acts 2 verses
- Acts 26:11 ἠνάγκαζον impf act ind 1sg Punishing them often in all the synagogues, I tried to make them blaspheme. Being exceedingly enraged against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities.
- Acts 28:19 ἠναγκάσθην aor pass ind 1sg But when the Jews spoke against it, I was constrained to appeal to Caesar, not that I had anything about which to accuse my nation.
2 Corinthians 1 verse
Galatians 3 verses
- Galatians 2:3 ἠναγκάσθη aor pass ind 3sg But not even Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised.
- Galatians 2:14 ἀναγκάζεις pres act ind 2sg But when I saw that they didn't walk uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel, I said to Peter before them all, "If you, being a Jew, live as the Gentiles do, and not as the Jews do, why do you compel the Gentiles to live as the Jews do?
- Galatians 6:12 ἀναγκάζουσιν pres act ind 3pl As many as desire to look good in the flesh, they compel you to be circumcised; only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ.
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 αναγκαζω centers on the idea of “to compel.” First canonically at Matthew 14:22, it enters the text early. It turns up in 9 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Galatians (33%), then Acts and Matthew. It clusters with αναγκη, αναγκαιος and αναγκαστως under a shared root. 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 G315 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.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 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.
- Pauline corpus 4 verses · 44%
- Gospels 3 verses · 33%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 33%
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: Compel 1×, Compelled 1×, Compellest thou 1×
- American Standard Version: Compel 1×, Compelled 1×, Compellest thou 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Made 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Compel 2×, He compelled 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G315 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G315 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G315 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 renderings that appear 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 G315 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 necessitate, compel, drive to, constrain
Word origin
Derived from αναγκη (anánkē) (G318) — necessity.
From G318 ; to necessitate : - compel constrain.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 8 distinct written forms G315 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἠνάγκασεν ēnánkasen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 14:22 | 2 |
| ἀνάγκασον anánkason | Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Singular | Luke 14:23 | 1 |
| ἀναγκάζεις anankázeis | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Galatians 2:14 | 1 |
| ἀναγκάζουσιν anankázousin | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Galatians 6:12 | 1 |
| ἠνάγκαζον ēnánkazon | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Acts 26:11 | 1 |
| ἠναγκάσατε ēnankásate | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural | 2 Corinthians 12:11 | 1 |
| ἠναγκάσθη ēnankásthē | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Galatians 2:3 | 1 |
| ἠναγκάσθην ēnankásthēn | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Acts 28:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G315, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word αναγκαζω appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Proverbs 6:7 ἀναἀγκάζω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G315) 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 (G315) 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.
