μελετάω
to care for
also: attend to carefully, practise fuller range ↓
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).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs 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”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 distinct verse where G3191 appears in the Present tense, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
1 Timothy 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.
μελεταω (meletáō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to care for.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Acts, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. It first appears in Acts 4:25. The lexical range runs to 2 senses — “to care for” plus “attend to carefully” and “practise”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3191 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 →
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.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 50%
- Pauline corpus 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: Do ye premeditate 1×, Imagine 1×, Meditate upon 1×
- American Standard Version: Be diligent 1×, Imagine 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Be diligent 1×, Plot 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Imagine 1×, Practice 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3191 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3191 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3191 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3191 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to care for, attend to carefully, practise
- to meditate i.e. to devise, contrive
Word origin
Derived from μελω (mélō) (G3199) — to care about.
From a presumed derivative of G3199 ; to take care of that is (by implication) revolve in the mind : - imagine (pre-) meditate.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G3191 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μελέτα meléta | Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Singular | 1 Timothy 4:15 | 1 |
| ἐμελέτησαν emelétēsan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 4:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3191, 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 μελεταω appears 30 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 29 verses in 5 books.
- 30
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 29
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Joshua 1:8 μελετάω
- Job 6:30 μελετάω
- Psalms 1:2 μελετάω
- Proverbs 8:7 μελετάω
- Isaiah 16:7 μελετάω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3191) 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.
- Joshua 1:8 μελετάω This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate thereon day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.
- Job 6:30 μελετάω Is there injustice on my tongue? Can't my taste discern mischievous things?
- Job 27:4 μελετάω Surely my lips shall not speak unrighteousness, Neither shall my tongue utter deceit.
- Psalms 1:2 μελετάω But his delight is in Yahweh's law; On his law he meditates day and night.
- Psalms 34:28 μελετάω
- Psalms 36:30 μελετάω
- Psalms 37:13 μελετάω The Lord will laugh at him, For he sees that his day is coming.
- Psalms 62:7 μελετάω With God is my salvation and my honor. The rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God.
- Psalms 70:24 μελετάω
- Psalms 76:6 μελετάω At your rebuke, God of Jacob, Both chariot and horse are cast into a deep sleep.
- Psalms 76:13 μελετάω
- Psalms 89:9 μελετάω You rule the pride of the sea. When its waves rise up, you calm them.
- Psalms 118:16 μελετάω The right hand of Yahweh is exalted! The right hand of Yahweh does valiantly!"
- Psalms 118:47 μελετάω
- Psalms 118:70 μελετάω
- Psalms 118:117 μελετάω
- Psalms 118:148 μελετάω
- Psalms 142:5 μελετάω I cried to you, Yahweh. I said, "You are my refuge, My portion in the land of the living."
- Proverbs 8:7 μελετάω For my mouth speaks truth. Wickedness is an abomination to my lips.
- Proverbs 11:2 μελετάω When pride comes, then comes shame, But with humility comes wisdom.
- Proverbs 15:28 μελετάω The heart of the righteous weighs answers, But the mouth of the wicked gushes out evil.
- Proverbs 19:27 μελετάω If you stop listening to instruction, my son, You will stray from the words of knowledge.
- Proverbs 24:2 μελετάω For their hearts plot violence, And their lips talk about mischief.
- Isaiah 16:7 μελετάω Therefore shall Moab wail for Moab, everyone shall wail: for the raisin-cakes of Kir Hareseth shall you mourn, utterly stricken.
- Isaiah 27:8 μελετάω In measure, when you send them away, you do contend with them; he has removed [them] with his rough blast in the day of the east wind.
- Isaiah 33:18 μελετάω Your heart shall muse on the terror: Where is he who counted, where is he who weighed [the tribute]? where is he who counted the towers?
- Isaiah 38:14 μελετάω Like a swallow [or] a crane, so did I chatter; I did moan as a dove; my eyes fail [with looking] upward: Lord, I am oppressed, be my collateral.
- Isaiah 59:3 μελετάω For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue mutters wickedness.
- Isaiah 59:13 μελετάω transgressing and denying Yahweh, and turning away from following our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3191) 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.
