πλεονεκτέω
to gain advantage
‘to gain advantage’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
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).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where G4122 appears in the Aorist tense, across 1 book. 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.
2 Corinthians 4 verses
- 2 Corinthians 2:11 πλεονεκτηθῶμεν aor pass subj 1pl that no advantage may be gained over us by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his schemes.
- 2 Corinthians 7:2 ἐπλεονεκτήσαμεν aor act ind 1pl Open your hearts to us. We wronged no one. We corrupted no one. We took advantage of no one.
- 2 Corinthians 12:17 ἐπλεονέκτησα aor act ind 1sg Did I take advantage of you by anyone of them whom I have sent to you?
- 2 Corinthians 12:18 ἐπλεονέκτησεν aor act ind 3sg I exhorted Titus, and I sent the brother with him. Did Titus take any advantage of you? Didn't we walk in the same spirit? Didn't we walk in the same steps?
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.
πλεονεκτεω — transliterated pleonektéō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to gain advantage.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 5 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in 2 Corinthians. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Corinthians 2:11. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4122 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,648
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,648 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Corinthians 4 verses 80%
- 1 Thessalonians 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 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: Defraud 1×, Did 1×, Did i make a gain 1×
- American Standard Version: Advantage 1×, I take advantage 1×, Take any advantage 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Exploit 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Be taken advantage of 1×, I took advantage of 1×, Take advantage of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4122 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4122 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4122 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G4122 across 6 tagged occurrences — 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 have more, or a greater part or share
- to gain or take advantage of another, to overreach
Word origin
Derived from πλεονεκτης (pleonéktēs) (G4123) — covetous.
From G4123 ; to be covetous that is (by implication) to over reach : - get an advantage defraud make a gain.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G4122 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| πλεονεκτεῖν pleonekteîn | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | 1 Thessalonians 4:6 | 1 |
| πλεονεκτηθῶμεν pleonektēthō̂men | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural | 2 Corinthians 2:11 | 1 |
| ἐπλεονέκτησα epleonéktēsa | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | 2 Corinthians 12:17 | 1 |
| ἐπλεονέκτησεν epleonéktēsen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | 2 Corinthians 12:18 | 1 |
| ἐπλεονεκτήσαμεν epleonektḗsamen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | 2 Corinthians 7:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4122, 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.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πλεονεκτεω appears 3 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 3 verses in 3 books.
- 3
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 3
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 4:11 πλεονεκτέω
- Ezekiel 22:27 πλεονεκτέω
- Habakkuk 2:9 πλεονεκτέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4122) 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.
- Judges 4:11 πλεονεκτέω Now Heber the Kenite had separated himself from the Kenites, even from the children of Hobab the brother-in-law of Moses, and had pitched his tent as far as the oak in Zaanannim, which is by Kedesh.
- Ezekiel 22:27 πλεονεκτέω Her princes in the midst of it are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, [and] to destroy souls, that they may get dishonest gain.
- Habakkuk 2:9 πλεονεκτέω Woe to him who gets an evil gain for his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the hand of evil!
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4122) 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.
