μεσονύκτιον
midnight
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where G3317 appears in the Genitive case in the Book of Acts. 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.
Acts
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.
“midnight” is the headline sense of the Greek noun μεσονυκτιον (mesonýktion). A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in Acts. First canonically at Mark 13:35, it enters the text early. It shares a root with μεσος, μεσημβρια and μεσιτης. See the sense tree, 4-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3317 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 75%
- Gospels 2 verses · 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: Midnight 4×
- American Standard Version: Midnight 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Midnight 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Midnight 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3317 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3317 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3317 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3317 across 4 tagged occurrences — 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.
- midnight
Word origin
Derived from μεσος (mésos) (G3319) — middle.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G3317 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μεσονυκτίου mesonyktíou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter | Luke 11:5 | 2 |
| μεσονύκτιον mesonýktion | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter | Mark 13:35 | 2 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3317, 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
- μεσημβρια mesēmbría G3314 noon
- μεσιτης mesítēs G3316 mediator
- μεσοτοιχον mesótoichon G3320 partition wall
- μεσουρανημα mesouránēma G3321 mid-heaven
- μεσοω mesóō G3322 to be midway
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μεσονυκτιον appears 4 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 4 books.
- 4
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- 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
- Judges 16:3 μεσονύκτιον
- Ruth 3:8 μεσονύκτιον
- Psalms 118:62 μεσονύκτιον
- Isaiah 59:10 μεσονύκτιον
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3317) 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.
- Judges 16:3 μεσονύκτιον Samson lay until midnight, and arose at midnight, and laid hold of the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and plucked them up, bar and all, and put them on his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of the mountain that is before Hebron.
- Ruth 3:8 μεσονύκτιον It happened at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself; and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.
- Psalms 118:62 μεσονύκτιον
- Isaiah 59:10 μεσονύκτιον We grope for the wall like the blind; yes, we grope as those who have no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the twilight; among those who are lusty we are as dead men.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3317) 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.
