ματαιόω
to make vain
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
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3154 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Romans 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.
ματαιοω (mataióō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to make vain.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 1 verse. It clusters heavily in Romans, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Its lone occurrence is Romans 1:21. It clusters with ματαιος, ματαιολογος and ματαιοτης under a shared root. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3154 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Romans 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 100%
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: Became vain 1×
- American Standard Version: Became vain 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: They became futile 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: They became futile 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3154 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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 make empty, vain, foolish
Word origin
Derived from ματαιος (mátaios) (G3152) — vain.
From G3152 ; to render (passively become ) foolish that is (morally) wicked or (specifically) idolatrous : - become vain.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3154, 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 ματαιοω appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 4 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- 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
- 1 Samuel 13:13 ματαιόω
- 2 Kings 17:15 ματαιόω
- 1 Chronicles 21:8 ματαιόω
- Jeremiah 2:5 ματαιόω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3154) 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.
- 1 Samuel 13:13 ματαιόω Samuel said to Saul, You have done foolishly; you have not kept the commandment of Yahweh your God, which he commanded you: for now would Yahweh have established your kingdom on Israel forever.
- 1 Samuel 26:21 ματαιόω Then said Saul, I have sinned: return, my son David; for I will no more do you harm, because my life was precious in your eyes this day: behold, I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly.
- 2 Kings 17:15 ματαιόω They rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified to them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and [went] after the nations that were round about them, concerning whom Yahweh had charged those who they should not do like them.
- 1 Chronicles 21:8 ματαιόω David said to God, I have sinned greatly, in that I have done this thing: but now, put away, I beg you, the iniquity of your servant; for I have done very foolishly.
- Jeremiah 2:5 ματαιόω thus says Yahweh, What unrighteousness have your fathers found in me, that they have gone far from me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain?
- Jeremiah 23:16 ματαιόω Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, Don't listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you: they teach you vanity; they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of Yahweh.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3154) 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.
