μηπως
lest
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Conjunction
- A joining word linking words or clauses.
Degree
- Negative
- Marks a negative form.
Every verse where G3381 appears in the Book of Galatians — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Galatians
- Galatians 2:2 μήπως conj neg I went up by revelation, and I laid before them the Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately before those who were respected, for fear that I might be running, or had run, in vain.
- Galatians 4:11 μήπως conj neg I am afraid for you, that I might have wasted my labor for you.
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.
“lest” is the headline sense of the Greek conjunction μηπως (mḗpōs). Scripture first uses it in 1 Corinthians 8:9. It appears 9 verses across 4 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in 2 Corinthians. It shares a root with μη, μηδαμως and μηδε. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3381 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 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 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Corinthians 4 verses 44%
- 1 Corinthians 2 verses 22%
- Galatians 2 verses 22%
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 9 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 9 verses · 100%
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: Lest 8×
- American Standard Version: Lest by any means 6×, Lest 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3381 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 G3381 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- lest, lest somehow, that perhaps
Word origin
Derived from μη (mḗ) (G3361) — not.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3381, 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
- μηδαμως mēdamōs G3365 by no means
- μηδε mēdé G3366 and not
- μηδεις mēdeís G3367 no one
- μηκετι mēkéti G3371 no longer
- μη ουκ mḕ ouk G3378 not ever
- μηποτε mḗpote G3379 lest
- μηπω mḗpō G3380 not yet
- μητε mḗte G3383 nor
- μητι mḗti G3385 whether
- μητις mḗtis G3387 let no one
- ου ou G3756 not
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
