Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

πνεῦμα

spirit

‘spirit’ is one of 5 main senses fuller range ↓

G4151 Strong's Greek
pneûma Transliteration
/pnyoo'-mah/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 379 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.

πνευμα (pneûma) is a Greek noun most often rendered “spirit.” The King James Version also renders it “ghost,” a usage modern versions have dropped for “spirit” — see the renderings breakdown. With 344 verses in 25 books, it is a common word in the Greek New Testament. It first appears in Matthew 1:18. Ranging over 5 senses, it is not a single-sense word. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
ghost
Modern gloss
spirit
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 G4151 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 →

344
distinct verses
The word appears in 344 distinct verses.
25 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 25 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 1:18
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 1:18.
Revelation 22:17
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:17.
#48
by frequency
Top 50 most frequent Greek words (rank 48 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 344 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 94 · 27%
  • Acts 68 · 20%
  • Pauline Epistles 125 · 36%
  • General Epistles 33 · 10%
  • Revelation 24 · 7%

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 344 distinct verses.

  • Pauline corpus 125 verses · 36%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 103 verses · 30%
  • Gospels 94 verses · 27%
  • Johannine 50 verses · 15%
  • Revelation 24 verses · 7%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 21 verses · 6%
  • Hebrews 12 verses · 3%

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: Spirit 254×, Ghost 91×, Spirits 32×
  • American Standard Version: Spirit 322×, The 43×, Spirits 31×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Spirit 335×, Spirits 32×, Breath 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Spirit 339×, The 62×, Spirits 34×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4151 across 385 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Spirit” 254×
  • “Ghost” 91×
  • “Spirits” 32×
  • “Through the spirit” 2×

Plus 6 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 G4151 across 428 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Spirit” 322×
  • “The” 43×
  • “Spirits” 31×
  • “Breath” 3×
  • “An” 2×
  • “In” 2×
  • “Save the spirit” 2×

Plus 23 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 G4151 across 378 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Spirit” 335×
  • “Spirits” 32×
  • “Breath” 3×

Plus 8 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 G4151 across 462 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Spirit” 339×
  • “The” 62×
  • “Spirits” 34×
  • “A” 4×
  • “An” 4×
  • “In” 4×
  • “Of” 4×
  • “Breath” 3×

Plus 8 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 5 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.

  1. the third person of the triune God, the Holy Spirit, coequal, coeternal with the Father and the Son
  2. the spirit, i.e. the vital principal by which the body is animated
  3. a spirit, i.e. a simple essence, devoid of all or at least all grosser matter, and possessed of the power of knowing,…
  4. the disposition or influence which fills and governs the soul of any one
  5. a movement of air (a gentle blast)

Word origin

Derived from πνεω (pnéō) (G4154) — to breathe.

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 11:32,9

From G4154 ; a current of air that is breath ( blast ) or a breeze ; by analogy or figuratively a spirit that is (human) the rational soul (by implication) vital principle mental disposition etc. or (superhuman) an angel daemon or (divine) God christ´ s spirit the holy spirit : - ghost life spirit (-ual -ually) mind. Compare G5590 .

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


Forms in the corpus

The 10 distinct written forms G4151 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
πνεῦμα pneûma Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 10:20 145
πνεύματος pneúmatos Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter Matthew 1:18 90
πνεύματι pneúmati Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 3:11 88
πνεύματα pneúmata Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Matthew 8:16 18
πνεῦμά pneûmá Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Luke 1:47 13
πνευμάτων pneumátōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter Matthew 10:1 11
πνεύματός pneúmatós Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter Matthew 1:20 6
πνεύμασιν pneúmasin Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter Luke 4:36 3
πνεύματί pneúmatí Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter Romans 1:9 3
πνεύμασι pneúmasi Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter Mark 1:27 2

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4151, 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 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word πνευμα appears 285 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 261 verses in 31 books.

285
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
261
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
31 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 31 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4151) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 261. 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 (G4151) 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.