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πόλις

city

‘city’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

G4172 Strong's Greek
pólis Transliteration
/pol'-is/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 164 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.

πολις — transliterated pólis — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “city.” It first appears in Matthew 2:23. With 155 verses in 13 books, it is a common word in the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Acts (27% of all occurrences). Its lexical range runs to 3 senses. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
city
Modern gloss
city
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G4172 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 →

155
distinct verses
The word appears in 155 distinct verses.
13 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 13 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 2:23
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 2:23.
Revelation 22:19
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:19.
#97
by frequency
Top 100 most frequent Greek words (rank 97 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 155 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 78 · 50%
  • Acts 42 · 27%
  • Pauline Epistles 4 · 3%
  • General Epistles 7 · 5%
  • Revelation 24 · 15%

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 155 distinct verses.

  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 79 verses · 51%
  • Gospels 78 verses · 50%
  • Johannine 32 verses · 21%
  • Revelation 24 verses · 15%
  • Pauline corpus 4 verses · 3%
  • Hebrews 4 verses · 3%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 3 verses · 2%

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: City 141×, Cities 19×
  • American Standard Version: City 133×, Cities 19×, For 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: City 87×, Town 47×, Towns 10×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: City 134×, Cities 19×, Town 8×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4172 across 164 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “City” 141×
  • “Cities” 19×

Plus 4 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 G4172 across 161 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “City” 133×
  • “Cities” 19×
  • “For” 2×
  • “Whatsoever leviticus city” 2×

Plus 5 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 G4172 across 158 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “City” 87×
  • “Town” 47×
  • “Towns” 10×
  • “Cities” 9×

Plus 5 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 6 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4172 across 176 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “City” 134×
  • “Cities” 19×
  • “Town” 8×
  • “The” 5×
  • “A” 3×
  • “For” 2×
  • “To” 2×

Plus 3 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 3 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. one's native city, the city in which one lives
  2. the heavenly Jerusalem
  3. the inhabitants of a city

Word origin

Derived from πολεμος (pólemos) (G4171) — war.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TDNT: 14:36,9

Probably from the same as G4171 or perhaps from G4183 ; a town (properly with walls of greater or less size): - city.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms G4172 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
πόλιν pólin Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 2:23 65
πόλεως póleōs Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine Matthew 10:14 36
πόλις pólis Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 5:14 22
πόλει pólei Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine Matthew 10:15 21
πόλεις póleis Noun, Accusative, Plural, Feminine Matthew 9:35 12
πόλεων póleōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Feminine Matthew 14:13 6
πόλεσιν pólesin Noun, Dative, Plural, Feminine Matthew 11:1 2

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4172, 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 πολις appears 1,226 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1,053 verses in 36 books.

1,226
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
1,053
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
36 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 36 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4172) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 1,053. 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 (G4172) 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.