πλεω
to sail
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-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
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
3 verses where G4126 appears in the Present tense in the Book of Acts. 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.
Acts
- Acts 27:2 πλεῖν pres act inf Embarking in a ship of Adramyttium, which was about to sail to places on the coast of Asia, we put to sea; Aristarchus, a Macedonian of Thessalonica, being with us.
- Acts 27:6 πλέον pres act ptcp acc sg neut There the centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing for Italy, and he put us on board.
- Acts 27:24 πλέοντας pres act ptcp acc pl masc saying, 'Don't be afraid, Paul. You must stand before Caesar. Behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.'
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, πλεω (pléō) means “to sail.” Its uses cluster heavily in Acts (67% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 3 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Greek New Testament. Scripture first uses it in Luke 8:23. From the same root come πλυνω, πλοιον and πλοος. 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 G4126 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 4 verses 67%
- Luke 1 verse 17%
- Revelation 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 5 verses · 83%
- Gospels 1 verse · 17%
- Johannine 1 verse · 17%
- Revelation 1 verse · 17%
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: Sail 2×, Sailed 2×
- American Standard Version: Sail 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sail 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sailing 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4126 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4126 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4126 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4126 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 sail, navigate, travel by ship
Word origin
Derived from πλυνω (plýnō) (G4150) — to wash.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G4126 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| πλέον pléon | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Singular, Neuter | Acts 27:6 | 1 |
| πλέοντας pléontas | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 27:24 | 1 |
| πλέων pléōn | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Revelation 18:17 | 1 |
| πλεόντων pleóntōn | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Luke 8:23 | 1 |
| πλεῖν pleîn | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Acts 27:2 | 1 |
| ἐπλέομεν epléomen | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | Acts 21:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4126, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πλεω appears 2 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 2 verses in 2 books.
- 2
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 2
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Isaiah 42:10 πλέω
- Jonah 1:3 πλέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4126) 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.
- Isaiah 42:10 πλέω Sing to Yahweh a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth; you who go down to the sea, and all that is therein, the isles, and the inhabitants of it.
- Jonah 1:3 πλέω But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh. He went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid its fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4126) 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.
