μονογενής
only
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G3439 appears in the Book of 1 John — 1 distinct verse. 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.
1 John
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.
μονογενης — transliterated monogenḗs — is a Greek adjective carrying the sense “only.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “only begotten” in the King James Version, “one and only” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. 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 John. Its earliest occurrence is Luke 7:12. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3439 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.
- #1,140
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,140 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Gospels 7 verses · 78%
- Johannine 5 verses · 56%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 33%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 11%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 11%
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: Only begotten 6×
- American Standard Version: Only begotten 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: One and only 4×, One and only son 2×, Only 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: One and only 9×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3439 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G3439 across 9 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 G3439 across 9 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3439 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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.
- single of its kind, only
Word origin
Derived from μονος (mónos) (G3441) — alone.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G3439 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μονογενὴς monogenḕs | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Luke 7:12 | 3 |
| μονογενῆ monogenē̂ | Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | John 3:16 | 3 |
| μονογενοῦς monogenoûs | Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | John 1:14 | 2 |
| μονογενής monogenḗs | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Luke 9:38 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3439, 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
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μονογενης appears 4 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 2 books.
- 4
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 11:34 μονογενής
- Psalms 21:21 μονογενής
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3439) 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 11:34 μονογενής Jephthah came to Mizpah to his house; and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with tambourines and with dances: and she was his only child; besides her he had neither son nor daughter.
- Psalms 21:21 μονογενής
- Psalms 24:16 μονογενής
- Psalms 34:17 μονογενής The righteous cry, and Yahweh hears, And delivers them out of all their troubles.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3439) 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.
