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πρῶτος

first

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

G4413 Strong's Greek
prōtos Transliteration
/pro'-tos/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 100 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.

“first” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective πρωτος (prōtos). Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 10:2. It turns up in 94 verses across 15 books, a moderately common footprint. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. It clusters with προ, πορρω and πρηνης under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
before
Modern gloss
first
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 G4413 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 →

94
distinct verses
The word appears in 94 distinct verses.
15 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 15 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 10:2
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 10:2.
Revelation 22:13
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:13.
#165
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 165 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 94 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 42 · 45%
  • Acts 13 · 14%
  • Pauline Epistles 12 · 13%
  • General Epistles 11 · 12%
  • Revelation 16 · 17%

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 94 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 42 verses · 45%
  • Johannine 27 verses · 29%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 22 verses · 23%
  • Revelation 16 verses · 17%
  • Pauline corpus 12 verses · 13%
  • Hebrews 9 verses · 10%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 2 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: First 72×, Chief 8×, Are first 2×
  • American Standard Version: First 71×, Than the first 5×, Chief 4×
  • Berean Standard Bible: First 75×, Leaders 3×, Leading 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: First 88×, Covenant 3×, Before 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4413 across 97 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “First” 72×
  • “Chief” 8×
  • “Are first” 2×
  • “Before” 2×
  • “Is the first” 2×
  • “Than the first” 2×

Plus 9 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.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G4413 across 98 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “First” 71×
  • “Than the first” 5×
  • “Chief” 4×
  • “Before” 2×
  • “Principal” 2×

Plus 14 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 G4413 across 94 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “First” 75×
  • “Leaders” 3×
  • “Leading” 3×
  • “Before” 2×
  • “Most important” 2×
  • “Worst” 2×

Plus 7 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 3 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4413 across 104 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “First” 88×
  • “Covenant” 3×
  • “Before” 2×
  • “First one” 2×
  • “First things” 2×
  • “Things” 2×

Plus 5 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. first in time or place
  2. first in rank
  3. first, at the first

Word origin

Derived from προ (pró) (G4253) — before.

Part of speech: Adjective TDNT: 20:26,0

Contracted superlative of G4253 ; foremost (in time place order or importance): - before beginning best chief (-est) first (of all) former.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 15 distinct written forms G4413 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
πρῶτος prō̂tos Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine, Superlative Matthew 10:2 28
πρώτη prṓtē Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine, Superlative Matthew 22:38 13
πρῶτοι prō̂toi Adjective, Nominative, Plural, Masculine, Superlative Matthew 19:30 11
πρώτων prṓtōn Adjective, Genitive, Plural, Neuter, Superlative Matthew 12:45 7
πρῶτον prō̂ton Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Neuter, Superlative John 12:16 7
πρώτην prṓtēn Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Feminine, Superlative Luke 15:22 6
πρώτῃ prṓtē Adjective, Dative, Singular, Feminine, Superlative Matthew 26:17 6
πρώτῳ prṓtō Adjective, Dative, Singular, Masculine, Superlative Luke 16:5 5
πρώτης prṓtēs Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Feminine, Superlative Matthew 27:64 4
πρώτους prṓtous Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Masculine, Superlative Acts 13:50 3
πρῶτός prō̂tós Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine, Superlative John 1:15 3
πρώτου prṓtou Adjective, Genitive, Singular, Masculine, Superlative John 19:32 2
πρῶτα prō̂ta Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter, Superlative Revelation 2:5 2
πρώτοις prṓtois Adjective, Dative, Plural, Masculine, Superlative Mark 6:21 2
πρώτως prṓtōs Adverb, Superlative Acts 11:26 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4413, 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

+47 more words share this root (not shown).

Derived from this word

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 80 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word πρωτος appears 177 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 168 verses in 30 books.

177
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
168
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
30 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 30 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4413) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 168. 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 (G4413) 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.