μεριμνάω
to be anxious
‘to be anxious’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- 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).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural 4 times (21%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 4 times (21%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural 3 times (16%)
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 2 times (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 2 times (11%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular 1 time (5%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (5%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 19 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G3309 appears — 17 distinct verses across 4 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 6 verses
- Matthew 6:25 μεριμνᾶτε pres act impv 2pl Therefore, I tell you, don't be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn't life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
- Matthew 6:27 μεριμνῶν pres act ptcp nom sg masc "Which of you, by being anxious, can add one cubit to the measure of his life?
- Matthew 6:28 μεριμνᾶτε pres act ind 2pl Why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They don't toil, neither do they spin,
- Matthew 6:31 μεριμνήσητε aor act subj 2pl "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?'
- Matthew 6:34 μεριμνήσητε μεριμνήσει aor act subj 2pl fut act ind 3sg Therefore don't be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Each day's own evil is sufficient.
- Matthew 10:19 μεριμνήσητε aor act subj 2pl But when they deliver you up, don't be anxious how or what you will say, for it will be given you in that hour what you will say.
Luke 5 verses
- Luke 10:41 μεριμνᾷς pres act ind 2sg Jesus answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things,
- Luke 12:11 μεριμνήσητε aor act subj 2pl When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, don't be anxious how or what you will answer, or what you will say;
- Luke 12:22 μεριμνᾶτε pres act impv 2pl He said to his disciples, "Therefore I tell you, don't be anxious for your life, what you will eat, nor yet for your body, what you will wear.
- Luke 12:25 μεριμνῶν pres act ptcp nom sg masc Which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his height?
- Luke 12:26 μεριμνᾶτε pres act ind 2pl If then you aren't able to do even the least things, why are you anxious about the rest?
1 Corinthians 4 verses
- 1 Corinthians 7:32 μεριμνᾷ pres act ind 3sg But I desire to have you to be free from cares. He who is unmarried is concerned for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord;
- 1 Corinthians 7:33 μεριμνᾷ pres act ind 3sg but he who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife.
- 1 Corinthians 7:34 μεριμνᾷ μεριμνᾷ pres act ind 3sg pres act ind 3sg There is also a difference between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she who is married cares about the things of the world--how she may please her husband.
- 1 Corinthians 12:25 μεριμνῶσιν pres act subj 3pl that there should be no division in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another.
Philippians 2 verses
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.
μεριμναω — transliterated merimnáō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to be anxious.” Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 6:25. Spanning 17 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Matthew (35% of all occurrences). Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. See the sense tree, 17-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3309 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 →
- 17
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 17 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #644
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 644 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 17 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Matthew 6 verses 35%
- Luke 5 verses 29%
- 1 Corinthians 4 verses 24%
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 17 distinct verses.
- Gospels 11 verses · 65%
- Pauline corpus 6 verses · 35%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 5 verses · 29%
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: Thought 6×, Take 4×, Careth 3×
- American Standard Version: Anxious 6×, Be 6×, Is careful for 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is concerned about 4×, Worry 3×, Worry about 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Do 4×, Is concerned about 4×, Be anxious 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3309 across 24 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3309 across 25 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 G3309 across 19 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3309 across 26 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.
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 be troubled with cares
- to care for, look out for (a thing)
Word origin
Derived from μεριμνα (mérimna) (G3308) — care.
From G3308 ; to be anxious about : - (be have) care (-ful) take thought.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms G3309 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μεριμνᾶτε merimnâte | Verb, Present, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | Matthew 6:25 | 5 |
| μεριμνήσητε merimnḗsēte | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural | Matthew 6:31 | 4 |
| μεριμνᾷ merimnâ | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 7:32 | 4 |
| μεριμνήσει merimnḗsei | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 6:34 | 2 |
| μεριμνῶν merimnō̂n | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 6:27 | 2 |
| μεριμνᾷς merimnâs | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Luke 10:41 | 1 |
| μεριμνῶσιν merimnō̂sin | Verb, Present, Active, Subjunctive, 3rd person, Plural | 1 Corinthians 12:25 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μεριμναω appears 7 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 6 books.
- 7
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 5:9 μεριμνάω
- 2 Samuel 7:10 μεριμνάω
- 1 Chronicles 17:9 μεριμνάω
- Psalms 37:19 μεριμνάω
- Proverbs 14:23 μεριμνάω
- Ezekiel 16:42 μεριμνάω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3309) 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.
- Exodus 5:9 μεριμνάω Let heavier work be laid on the men, that they may labor therein; and don't let them pay any attention to lying words."
- 2 Samuel 7:10 μεριμνάω I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be moved no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more, as at the first,
- 1 Chronicles 17:9 μεριμνάω I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in their own place, and be moved no more; neither shall the children of wickedness waste them any more, as at the first,
- Psalms 37:19 μεριμνάω They shall not be disappointed in the time of evil. In the days of famine they shall be satisfied.
- Proverbs 14:23 μεριμνάω In all hard work there is profit, But the talk of the lips leads only to poverty.
- Ezekiel 16:42 μεριμνάω So will I cause my wrath toward you to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from you, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3309) 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.
