πτέρνα
heel
‘heel’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G4418 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
John 1 verse
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.
The Greek noun πτερνα centers on the idea of “heel.” It occurs a mere 1 verse across Scripture. John dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Found nowhere else but John 13:18. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4418 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- John 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Gospels 1 verse · 100%
- Johannine 1 verse · 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: Heel 1×
- American Standard Version: Heel 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Heel 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Heel 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4418 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4418 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4418 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4418 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- the heel (of the foot)
- to lift up the heel against one
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain derivation
Of uncertain derivation; the heel (figuratively): - heel.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πτερνα appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 4 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 3:15 πτέρνα
- Joshua 23:13 πτέρνα
- Judges 5:22 πτέρνα
- Psalms 55:7 πτέρνα
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4418) 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.
- Genesis 3:15 πτέρνα I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel."
- Genesis 25:26 πτέρνα After that, his brother came out, and his hand had hold on Esau's heel. He was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.
- Genesis 49:17 πτέρνα Dan will be a serpent in the way, An adder in the path, That bites the horse's heels, So that his rider falls backward.
- Joshua 23:13 πτέρνα know for a certainty that Yahweh your God will no more drive these nations from out of your sight; but they shall be a snare and a trap to you, and a scourge in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from off this good land which Yahweh your God has given you.
- Judges 5:22 πτέρνα Then did the horse hoofs stamp By reason of the prancings, the prancings of their strong ones.
- Psalms 55:7 πτέρνα Behold, then I would wander far off. I would lodge in the wilderness." Selah.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4418) 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.
