ὀρχέομαι
to dance
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Middle deponent
- Middle in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Genitive, Singular, Feminine 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G3738 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 books. 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 2 verses
Mark 1 verse
Luke 1 verse
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.
ορχεομαι (orchéomai) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to dance.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Matthew, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. It first appears in Matthew 11:17. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3738 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.
- Gospels 4 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 25%
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: Danced 4×, Ye have 2×
- American Standard Version: Dance 2×, Danced 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Danced 2×, You did not dance 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dance 2×, You did 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3738 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3738 across 5 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3738 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3738 across 6 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.
- to dance
Word origin
Origin: middle voice from orchos (a row or ring)
Middle voice from όρχος orchos (a row or ring ); to dance (from the ranklike or regular motion): - dance.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3738 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ὠρχήσασθε ōrchḗsasthe | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural | Matthew 11:17 | 2 |
| ὀρχησαμένης orchēsaménēs | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Mark 6:22 | 1 |
| ὠρχήσατο ōrchḗsato | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 14:6 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ορχεομαι appears 7 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 4 books.
- 7
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- 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
- 2 Samuel 6:16 ὀρχέομαι
- 1 Chronicles 15:29 ὀρχέομαι
- Ecclesiastes 3:4 ὀρχέομαι
- Isaiah 13:21 ὀρχέομαι
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3738) 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.
- 2 Samuel 6:16 ὀρχέομαι It was so, as the ark of Yahweh came into the city of David, that Michal the daughter of Saul looked out at the window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before Yahweh; and she despised him in her heart.
- 2 Samuel 6:20 ὀρχέομαι Then David returned to bless his household. Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel today, who uncovered himself today in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!
- 2 Samuel 6:21 ὀρχέομαι David said to Michal, [It was] before Yahweh, who chose me above your father, and above all his house, to appoint me prince over the people of Yahweh, over Israel: therefore will I play before Yahweh.
- 1 Chronicles 15:29 ὀρχέομαι It happened, as the ark of the covenant of Yahweh came to the city of David, that Michal the daughter of Saul looked out at the window, and saw king David dancing and playing; and she despised him in her heart.
- Ecclesiastes 3:4 ὀρχέομαι A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance;
- Isaiah 13:21 ὀρχέομαι But wild animals of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and ostriches shall dwell there, and wild goats shall dance there.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3738) 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.
