ξένος
stranger
‘stranger’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where G3581 appears in the Dative case in the Book of Matthew. 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.
Matthew
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.
“stranger” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective ξενος (xénos). Lexicons map it across 4 senses. With 14 verses in 7 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. It concentrates in Matthew, which alone accounts for 36% of its uses. First canonically at Matthew 25:35, it enters the text early. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3581 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
- #814
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 814 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 14 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 14 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 36%
- Pauline corpus 3 verses · 21%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 14%
- Hebrews 2 verses · 14%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 2 verses · 14%
- Johannine 1 verse · 7%
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: Strangers 6×, Stranger 4×, Strange 2×
- American Standard Version: Strangers 6×, Stranger 4×, Strange 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Stranger 4×, Strangers 4×, Foreigners 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Strangers 5×, Stranger 4×, Strange 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3581 across 14 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3581 across 14 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3581 across 14 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3581 across 15 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.
Senses in Thayer's
The 4 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.
- alien (from a person or a thing)
- without the knowledge of, without a share in
- new, unheard of
- one who receives and entertains another hospitably
Word origin
Origin: apparently a primary word
Apparently a primary word; foreign (literally alien or figuratively novel ); by implication a guest or (vice-versa) entertainer : - host strange (-r).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 8 distinct written forms G3581 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ξένοι xénoi | Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 17:21 | 4 |
| ξένος xénos | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 25:35 | 3 |
| ξένον xénon | Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 25:38 | 2 |
| ξέναις xénais | Adjective, Dative, Plural, Feminine | Hebrews 13:9 | 1 |
| ξένοις xénois | Adjective, Dative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 27:7 | 1 |
| ξένου xénou | Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Neuter | 1 Peter 4:12 | 1 |
| ξένους xénous | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | 3 John 1:5 | 1 |
| ξένων xénōn | Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Neuter | Acts 17:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3581, 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
- ξενια xenía G3578 hospitality
- ξενιζω xenízō G3579 to entertain
- ξενοδοχεω xenodochéō G3580 to be hospitable
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ξενος appears 9 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 9 verses in 8 books.
- 9
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 9
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Ruth 2:10 ξένος
- 1 Samuel 9:13 ξένος
- 2 Samuel 12:4 ξένος
- Job 31:32 ξένος
- Psalms 68:9 ξένος
- Ecclesiastes 6:2 ξένος
- Isaiah 18:2 ξένος
- Lamentations 5:2 ξένος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3581) 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.
- Ruth 2:10 ξένος Then she fell on her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and said to him, Why have I found favor in your sight, that you should take knowledge of me, seeing I am a foreigner?
- 1 Samuel 9:13 ξένος as soon as you are come into the city, you shall immediately find him, before he goes up to the high place to eat; for the people will not eat until he come, because he does bless the sacrifice; [and] afterwards they eat who are invited. Now therefore get you up; for at this time you shall find him.
- 2 Samuel 12:4 ξένος A traveler came to the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man who had come to him, but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man who had come to him."
- 2 Samuel 15:19 ξένος Then said the king to Ittai the Gittite, Why go you also with us? return, and abide with the king: for you are a foreigner, and also an exile; [return] to your own place.
- Job 31:32 ξένος (The foreigner has not lodged in the street; But I have opened my doors to the traveler);
- Psalms 68:9 ξένος You, God, sent a plentiful rain. You confirmed your inheritance, when it was weary.
- Ecclesiastes 6:2 ξένος a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him no power to eat of it, but an alien eats it. This is vanity, and it is an evil disease.
- Isaiah 18:2 ξένος that sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus on the waters, [saying], Go, you swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that measures out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide!
- Lamentations 5:2 ξένος Our inheritance is turned to strangers, Our houses to aliens.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3581) 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.
