ἀναγκαῖος
necessary
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Degree
- Comparative
- Expresses a greater degree (“greater,” “more”).
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Neuter 2 times (25%)
- Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter 2 times (25%)
- Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Feminine 1 time (13%)
- Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (13%)
- Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Neuter 1 time (13%)
- Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter, Comparative 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G316 appears — 8 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.
Acts 2 verses
- Acts 10:24 ἀναγκαίους adj acc pl masc On the next day they entered into Caesarea. Cornelius was waiting for them, having called together his relatives and his near friends.
- Acts 13:46 ἀναγκαῖον adj nom sg neut Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, and said, "It was necessary that God's word should be spoken to you first. Since indeed you thrust it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we turn to the Gentiles.
1 Corinthians 1 verse
2 Corinthians 1 verse
Philippians 2 verses
Titus 1 verse
Hebrews 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.
“necessary” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective αναγκαιος (anankaîos). Its earliest occurrence is Acts 10:24. The Greek New Testament uses it across 8 verses — uncommon. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Acts. Related forms include αναγκη and αναγκαζω. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G316 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 2 verses 25%
- Philippians 2 verses 25%
- 1 Corinthians 1 verse 13%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 63%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 25%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 13%
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: Necessary 5×
- American Standard Version: Necessary 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Necessary 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Essential 2×, Necessary 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G316 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G316 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G316 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 G316 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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.
- necessary
Word origin
Derived from αναγκη (anánkē) (G318) — necessity.
From G318 ; necessary ; by implication close (of kin): - near necessary necessity needful.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G316 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀναγκαῖον anankaîon | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Acts 13:46 | 3 |
| ἀναγκαίας anankaías | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Feminine | Titus 3:14 | 1 |
| ἀναγκαίους anankaíous | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 10:24 | 1 |
| ἀναγκαιότερον anankaióteron | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter, Comparative | Philippians 1:24 | 1 |
| ἀναγκαῖά anankaîá | Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Neuter | 1 Corinthians 12:22 | 1 |
| Ἀναγκαῖον Anankaîon | Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Neuter | Philippians 2:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G316, 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.
