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οστις

whoever

G3748 Strong's Greek
hóstis Transliteration
/hos'-tis/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 146 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.

The Greek word οστις centers on the idea of “whoever.” Debuting at Matthew 2:6, it then recurs through the corpus. Spanning 140 verses in 22 books, it ranks among the common words of the Greek New Testament. Sharing its root, it stands alongside ος, ο εστι and οθεν. Dig into 140-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
and
Modern gloss
whoever
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G3748 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 →

140
distinct verses
The word appears in 140 distinct verses.
22 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 22 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 2:6
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 2:6.
Revelation 20:4
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 20:4.
#111
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 111 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 140 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 54 · 39%
  • Acts 23 · 16%
  • Pauline Epistles 39 · 28%
  • General Epistles 15 · 11%
  • Revelation 9 · 6%

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 140 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 54 verses · 39%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 45 verses · 32%
  • Pauline corpus 39 verses · 28%
  • Johannine 12 verses · 9%
  • Hebrews 10 verses · 7%
  • Revelation 9 verses · 6%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 5 verses · 4%

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: Which 79×, Who 30×, Whosoever 12×
  • American Standard Version: Who 46×, Which 34×, That 10×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Who 42×, Which 13×, Whoever 10×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Who 76×, Which 31×, Whoever 15×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G3748 across 149 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Which” 79×
  • “Who” 30×
  • “Whosoever” 12×
  • “That” 4×
  • “They” 4×
  • “Whatsoever” 4×
  • “As” 3×
  • “Things” 3×

Plus 10 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 4 further occurrences.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G3748 across 135 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Who” 46×
  • “Which” 34×
  • “That” 10×
  • “Whosoever” 9×
  • “They” 4×
  • “As” 3×
  • “Men who” 3×
  • “Such” 3×
  • “Is” 2×
  • “One” 2×
  • “Things” 2×

Plus 17 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 G3748 across 84 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Who” 42×
  • “Which” 13×
  • “Whoever” 10×
  • “That” 5×
  • “They” 3×
  • “Someone” 2×
  • “This” 2×

Plus 7 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 52 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G3748 across 147 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Who” 76×
  • “Which” 31×
  • “Whoever” 15×
  • “That” 5×
  • “Things” 3×
  • “This” 3×
  • “Until” 3×
  • “They” 2×
  • “Whatever” 2×

Plus 7 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.

  1. whoever, whatever, who

Word origin

Derived from ος (hós) (G3739) — who.

From G3739 and G5100 ; which some that is any that ; also (definitely) which same : - X and (they) (such) as (they) that in that they what (-soever) whereas ye (they) which who (-soever). Compare G3754 .

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


Forms in the corpus

The 8 distinct written forms G3748 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
οἵτινες hoítines Relative pronoun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 7:15 57
ἥτις hḗtis Relative pronoun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 27:62 38
ὅστις hóstis Relative pronoun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 2:6 27
αἵτινες haítines Relative pronoun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine Matthew 25:1 10
ὅτου hótou Relative pronoun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter, Attic form Matthew 5:25 7
οἵτινές hoítinés Relative pronoun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Romans 9:4 3
ἅτινά hátiná Relative pronoun, Nominative, Plural, Neuter Galatians 4:24 3
ἅτινα hátina Relative pronoun, Nominative, Plural, Neuter Philippians 3:7 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3748, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 17 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word οστις appears 100 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 94 verses in 20 books.

100
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
94
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
20 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 20 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3748) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 94. 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 (G3748) 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.