τρίβολος
thistle
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
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.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G5146 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Matthew 1 verse
Hebrews 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.
τριβολος — transliterated tríbolos — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “thistle.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in Matthew. Debuting at Matthew 7:16, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with τρεις, τριακοντα and τριακοσιοι. 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 G5146 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 1 verse · 50%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 50%
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: Briers 1×, Thistles 1×
- American Standard Version: Thistles 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Thistles 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Thistles 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5146 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5146 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5146 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5146 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a thistle, a prickly wild plant, hurtful to other plants
Word origin
Derived from τρεις (treîs) (G5140) — three.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G5146 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| τριβόλους tribólous | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Hebrews 6:8 | 1 |
| τριβόλων tribólōn | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 7:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5146, 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
- τριακοντα triákonta G5144 thirty
- τριακοσιοι triakósioi G5145 three hundred
- τριετια trietía G5148 three years
- τριμηνον trímēnon G5150 three months
- τρις trís G5151 thrice
- τριστεγον trístegon G5152 third story
- τριτος trítos G5154 third
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word τριβολος appears 4 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 4 verses in 4 books.
- 4
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 4
- 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 3:18 τρίβολος
- 2 Samuel 12:31 τρίβολος
- Proverbs 22:5 τρίβολος
- Hosea 10:8 τρίβολος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5146) 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 3:18 τρίβολος Thorns also and thistles will it bring forth to you; and you will eat the herb of the field.
- 2 Samuel 12:31 τρίβολος He brought forth the people who were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln: and thus did he to all the cities of the children of Ammon. David and all the people returned to Jerusalem.
- Proverbs 22:5 τρίβολος Thorns and snares are in the path of the wicked: Whoever guards his soul stays from them.
- Hosea 10:8 τρίβολος The high places also of Aven, the sin of Israel, will be destroyed. The thorn and the thistle will come up on their altars. They will tell the mountains, "Cover us!" and the hills, "Fall on us!"
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5146) 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.
