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ἅγιος

saint

G40 Strong's Greek
hágios Transliteration
/hag'-ee-os/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 233 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.

At its core, αγιος (hágios) means “saint.” First canonically at Matthew 1:18, it enters the text early. With 221 verses in 23 books, it is a common word in the Greek New Testament. From the same root come αγνος, αγνεια and αγνιζω. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
holy
Modern gloss
saint
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 G40 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 →

221
distinct verses
The word appears in 221 distinct verses.
23 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 23 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 1:18
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 1:18.
Revelation 22:19
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:19.
#68
by frequency
Top 100 most frequent Greek words (rank 68 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 221 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 41 · 19%
  • Acts 52 · 24%
  • Pauline Epistles 73 · 33%
  • General Epistles 32 · 14%
  • Revelation 23 · 10%

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 221 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 73 verses · 33%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 71 verses · 32%
  • Gospels 41 verses · 19%
  • Johannine 29 verses · 13%
  • Revelation 23 verses · 10%
  • Hebrews 17 verses · 8%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 15 verses · 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: Holy 150×, Saints 58×, Holy one 4×
  • American Standard Version: Holy 139×, Saints 55×, Is holy 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Holy 157×, Saints 60×, Holy place 5×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Holy 159×, Saints 60×, Places 6×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G40 across 229 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Holy” 150×
  • “Saints” 58×
  • “Holy one” 4×
  • “Is holy” 3×
  • “Be holy” 2×
  • “Be saints” 2×
  • “He that is holy” 2×

Plus 8 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 G40 across 227 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Holy” 139×
  • “Saints” 55×
  • “Is holy” 5×
  • “Holy one” 3×
  • “The” 3×
  • “Be saints” 2×
  • “He that is holy” 2×
  • “Spirit” 2×

Plus 16 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 G40 across 231 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Holy” 157×
  • “Saints” 60×
  • “Holy place” 5×
  • “Sanctuary” 3×
  • “Holy one” 2×

Plus 4 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 2 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G40 across 250 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Holy” 159×
  • “Saints” 60×
  • “Places” 6×
  • “Holy one” 5×
  • “Is holy” 5×
  • “To” 5×
  • “Of” 2×
  • “Place” 2×

Plus 6 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. most holy thing, a saint

Word origin

Derived from αγνος (hagnós) (G53) — sacred.

Part of speech: Adjective TDNT: 02:28,1

From ἅγος hagos (an awful thing) compare G53 [ H2282 ]; sacred (physically pure morally blameless or religious ceremonially consecrated ): - (most) holy (one thing) saint.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 19 distinct written forms G40 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἅγιον hágion Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Mark 13:11 46
ἁγίου hagíou Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Neuter Matthew 1:18 42
ἁγίων hagíōn Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 27:52 38
ἁγίῳ hagíō Adjective, Dative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 3:11 26
ἁγίοις hagíois Adjective, Dative, Plural, Masculine Acts 9:13 19
ἁγίους hagíous Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Acts 9:32 12
ἅγιος hágios Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Mark 1:24 12
ἅγιοι hágioi Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 Corinthians 6:2 8
ἅγια hágia Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Hebrews 9:12 6
ἁγία hagía Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Acts 7:33 6
ἁγίαν hagían Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 4:5 6
ἁγίαις hagíais Adjective, Dative, Plural, Feminine Romans 1:2 3
ἁγίας hagías Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Luke 1:72 3
ἁγίᾳ hagía Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine 2 Timothy 1:9 1
ἁγιωτάτῃ hagiōtátē Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine, Superlative Jude 1:20 1
ἅγιά hágiá Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Neuter 1 Corinthians 7:14 1
ἅγιαι hágiai Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Feminine 1 Peter 3:5 1
ἅγιε hágie Adjective, Vocative, Singular, Masculine John 17:11 1
ἅγιός hágiós Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 Corinthians 3:17 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G40, 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 10 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αγιος appears 634 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 531 verses in 32 books.

634
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
531
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
32 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 32 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G40) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 531. 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 (G40) 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.