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μήτηρ

mother

‘mother’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G3384 Strong's Greek
mḗtēr Transliteration
/may'-tare/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 84 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

“mother” is the headline sense of the Greek noun μητηρ (mḗtēr). First canonically at Matthew 1:18, it enters the text early. The Greek New Testament uses it across 77 verses — moderately common. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Matthew. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
mother
Modern gloss
mother
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G3384 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 →

77
distinct verses
The word appears in 77 distinct verses.
11 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 11 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 1:18
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 1:18.
Revelation 17:5
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 17:5.
#204
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 204 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 77 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 65 · 84%
  • Acts 4 · 5%
  • Pauline Epistles 7 · 9%
  • General Epistles 0 · 0%
  • Revelation 1 · 1%

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 77 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 65 verses · 84%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 20 verses · 26%
  • Johannine 10 verses · 13%
  • Pauline corpus 7 verses · 9%
  • Revelation 1 verse · 1%

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: Mother 76×, Mother's 7×, Mothers 2×
  • American Standard Version: Mother 81×, Mothers 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Mother 74×, Mother’s 4×, Mothers 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mother 79×, Of 6×, To 4×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G3384 across 85 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mother” 76×
  • “Mother's” 7×
  • “Mothers” 2×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G3384 across 85 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mother” 81×
  • “Mothers” 2×

Plus 2 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 G3384 across 80 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mother” 74×
  • “Mother’s” 4×
  • “Mothers” 2×

Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G3384 across 93 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mother” 79×
  • “Of” 6×
  • “To” 4×
  • “Mother s” 2×
  • “Mothers” 2×

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.

  1. a mother
  2. metaph. the source of something, the motherland

Word origin

Origin: apparently a primary word

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 14:42,6

Apparently a primary word; a mother (literally or figuratively immediate or remote): - mother.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms G3384 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
μήτηρ mḗtēr Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 12:46 32
μητέρα mētéra Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 2:13 27
μητρὸς mētròs Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Matthew 1:18 11
μητρὶ mētrì Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 14:11 6
μητρί mētrí Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 15:5 5
μητέρας mētéras Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Mark 10:30 2
μητρός mētrós Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Galatians 1:15 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3384, 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 μητηρ appears 229 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 209 verses in 26 books.

229
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
209
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
26 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 26 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3384) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 209. 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 (G3384) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.