φαῦλος
worthless
also: easy, slight, ordinary, mean 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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G5337 appears in the Book of Romans — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Romans
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.
“worthless” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective φαυλος (phaûlos). First canonically at John 3:20, it enters the text early. The Greek New Testament uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. More than a third of its appearances fall in John. Not a single-sense word, it carries 2 senses, among them “easy”, “slight”, and “ordinary”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5337 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 5 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 5 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- John 2 verses 33%
- Romans 1 verse 17%
- 2 Corinthians 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 3 verses · 50%
- Gospels 2 verses · 33%
- Johannine 2 verses · 33%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 17%
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: Evil 4×
- American Standard Version: Evil 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bad 3×, Evil 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bad 2×, Evil 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5337 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5337 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 G5337 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5337 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- easy, slight, ordinary, mean, worthless, of no account
- ethically, bad, base, wicked
Word origin
Origin: apparently a primary word
Apparently a primary word; foul or flawy that is (figuratively) wicked : - evil.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G5337 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| φαῦλον phaûlon | Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Neuter | Romans 9:11 | 4 |
| φαῦλα phaûla | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | John 3:20 | 2 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word φαυλος appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 8 verses in 2 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 8
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Job 6:3 φαῦλος
- Proverbs 5:3 φαῦλος
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5337) 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.
- Job 6:3 φαῦλος For now it would be heavier than the sand of the seas, Therefore have my words been rash.
- Job 6:25 φαῦλος How forcible are words of uprightness! But your reproof, what does it reprove?
- Job 9:23 φαῦλος If the scourge kills suddenly, He will mock at the trial of the innocent.
- Proverbs 5:3 φαῦλος For the lips of an adulteress drip honey. Her mouth is smoother than oil,
- Proverbs 13:6 φαῦλος Righteousness guards the way of integrity, But wickedness overthrows the sinner.
- Proverbs 16:17 φαῦλος The highway of the upright is to depart from evil. He who keeps his way preserves his soul.
- Proverbs 22:8 φαῦλος He who sows wickedness reaps trouble, And the rod of his fury will be destroyed.
- Proverbs 29:9 φαῦλος If a wise man goes to court with a foolish man, The fool rages or scoffs, and there is no peace.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5337) 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.
