πειράω
to attempt
‘to attempt’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Middle or Passive deponent
- Middle/passive in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3987 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Acts 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.
πειραω — transliterated peiráō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to attempt.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Greek New Testament. Its uses cluster heavily in Acts (100% of all occurrences). Found nowhere else but Acts 26:21. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. 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 G3987 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 100%
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: He assayed 1×, Went about 1×
- American Standard Version: Assayed 1×, He assayed 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Tried 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Were trying 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3987 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3987 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- to make a trial of, to attempt
- to test, to make trial of one, put him to proof
Word origin
Derived from πειρα (peîra) (G3984) — trial.
From G3984 ; to test (subjectively) that is (reflexively) to attempt : - assay.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3987, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
