ὑμνέω
to sing hymns
‘to sing hymns’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G5214 appears — 4 distinct verses across 4 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
Mark 1 verse
Acts 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.
υμνεω — transliterated hymnéō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to sing hymns.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. Its uses concentrate in Matthew (25% of all occurrences). It first appears in Matthew 26:30. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. 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 G5214 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 50%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 25%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 25%
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: They had sung an hymn 2×
- American Standard Version: They had sung a hymn 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: They had sung a hymn 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Having sung a hymn 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5214 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 G5214 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 G5214 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5214 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 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.
- to sing the praise of, sing hymns to
- singing of paschal hymns these were Psalms 113 - 118 and 136, which the Jews called the "great Hallel"
Word origin
Derived from υμνος (hýmnos) (G5215) — hymn.
From G5215 ; to hymn that is sing a religious ode; by implication to celebrate (God) in song : - sing an hymn (praise unto).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G5214 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ὑμνήσαντες hymnḗsantes | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 26:30 | 2 |
| ὑμνήσω hymnḗsō | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Hebrews 2:12 | 1 |
| ὕμνουν hýmnoun | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 16:25 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word υμνεω appears 51 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 50 verses in 8 books.
- 51
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 50
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 16:24 ὑμνέω
- 1 Chronicles 16:9 ὑμνέω
- 2 Chronicles 23:13 ὑμνέω
- Ezra 22:24 ὑμνέω
- Psalms 21:23 ὑμνέω
- Proverbs 1:20 ὑμνέω
- Isaiah 12:4 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:24 ὑμνέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5214) 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.
- Judges 16:24 ὑμνέω When the people saw him, they praised their god; for they said, Our god has delivered into our hand our enemy, and the destroyer of our country, who has slain many of us.
- 1 Chronicles 16:9 ὑμνέω Sing to him, sing praises to him; Talk you of all his marvelous works.
- 2 Chronicles 23:13 ὑμνέω and she looked, and, behold, the king stood by his pillar at the entrance, and the captains and the trumpets by the king; and all the people of the land rejoiced, and blew trumpets; the singers also [played] on instruments of music, and led the singing of praise. Then Athaliah tore her clothes, and said, Treason! treason!
- 2 Chronicles 29:30 ὑμνέω Moreover Hezekiah the king and the princes commanded the Levites to sing praises to Yahweh with the words of David, and of Asaph the seer. They sang praises with gladness, and they bowed their heads and worshiped.
- Ezra 22:24 ὑμνέω
- Psalms 21:23 ὑμνέω
- Psalms 64:14 ὑμνέω
- Psalms 70:8 ὑμνέω
- Proverbs 1:20 ὑμνέω Wisdom calls aloud in the street. She utters her voice in the public squares.
- Proverbs 8:3 ὑμνέω Beside the gates, at the entry of the city, At the entry doors, she cries aloud:
- Isaiah 12:4 ὑμνέω In that day you will say, "Give thanks to Yahweh! Call on his name. Declare his doings among the peoples. Proclaim that his name is exalted!
- Isaiah 12:5 ὑμνέω Sing to Yahweh, for he has done excellent things! Let this be known in all the earth!
- Isaiah 25:1 ὑμνέω Yahweh, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, [even] counsels of old, in faithfulness [and] truth.
- Isaiah 42:10 ὑμνέω Sing to Yahweh a new song, and his praise from the end of the earth; you who go down to the sea, and all that is therein, the isles, and the inhabitants of it.
- Daniel 3:24 ὑμνέω Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste: he spoke and said to his counselors, Didn't we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered the king, True, O king.
- Daniel 3:51 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:57 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:58 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:59 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:60 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:61 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:62 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:63 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:64 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:65 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:66 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:67 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:68 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:69 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:70 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:71 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:72 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:73 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:74 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:75 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:76 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:77 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:78 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:79 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:80 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:81 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:82 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:83 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:84 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:85 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:86 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:87 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:88 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:90 ὑμνέω
- Daniel 3:91 ὑμνέω
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5214) 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.
