μέλω
to care about
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
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”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
8 distinct verses where G3199 appears in the Present tense, across 6 books. 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.
Matthew 1 verse
Mark 2 verses
- Mark 4:38 μέλει pres act ind 3sg He himself was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up, and told him, "Teacher, don't you care that we are dying?"
- Mark 12:14 μέλει pres act ind 3sg When they had come, they asked him, "Teacher, we know that you are honest, and don't defer to anyone; for you aren't partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?
Luke 1 verse
John 1 verse
1 Corinthians 2 verses
- 1 Corinthians 7:21 μελέτω pres act impv 3sg Were you called being a bondservant? Don't let that bother you, but if you get an opportunity to become free, use it.
- 1 Corinthians 9:9 μέλει pres act ind 3sg For it is written in the law of Moses, "You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain." Is it for the oxen that God cares,
1 Peter 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.
μελω (mélō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to care about.” It first appears in Matthew 22:16. It turns up in 10 verses across 7 books, an uncommon footprint. From the same root come μελεταω and μελλω. 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 G3199 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,056
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,056 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 10 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Mark 2 verses 20%
- John 2 verses 20%
- 1 Corinthians 2 verses 20%
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 10 distinct verses.
- Gospels 6 verses · 60%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 20%
- Johannine 2 verses · 20%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 20%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 10%
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: Care 2×, Cared 2×, Carest 2×
- American Standard Version: Carest 3×, Careth 3×, Care 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Seek favor 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Concern 4×, Is 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3199 across 12 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3199 across 12 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3199 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G3199 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 care about
Word origin
Origin: a root word
A primary verb; to be of interest to that is to concern (only third person singular present indicative used impersonally it matters ): - (take) care.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3199 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μέλει mélei | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 22:16 | 7 |
| ἔμελεν émelen | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 12:6 | 2 |
| μελέτω melétō | Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 3rd person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 7:21 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3199, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μελω 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
- Job 22:3 μέλω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3199) 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 (G3199) 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.
