φθάνω
to anticipate
‘to anticipate’ is one of 3 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 4 times (57%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural 2 times (29%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural 1 time (14%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G5348 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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
Luke 1 verse
Romans 1 verse
2 Corinthians 1 verse
Philippians 1 verse
1 Thessalonians 2 verses
- 1 Thessalonians 2:16 ἔφθασεν aor act ind 3sg forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved; to fill up their sins always. But wrath has come on them to the uttermost.
- 1 Thessalonians 4:15 φθάσωμεν aor act subj 1pl For this we tell you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left to the coming of the Lord, will in no way precede those who have fallen asleep.
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.
“to anticipate” is the headline sense of the Greek verb φθανω (phthánō). Its earliest occurrence is Matthew 12:28. It turns up in 7 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. It concentrates in 1 Thessalonians, which alone accounts for 29% of its uses. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5348 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,358
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,358 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Thessalonians 2 verses 29%
- Matthew 1 verse 14%
- Luke 1 verse 14%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 71%
- Gospels 2 verses · 29%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 14%
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: Is come 3×
- American Standard Version: Come 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Has come 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Has come 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5348 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 G5348 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 G5348 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 G5348 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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.
- to come before, precede, anticipate
- to come to, arrive at
- to reach, attain to
Word origin
Origin: apparently a primary verb
Apparently a primary verb; to be beforehand that is anticipate or precede ; by extension to have arrived at : - (already) attain come prevent.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G5348 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἔφθασεν éphthasen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 12:28 | 4 |
| ἐφθάσαμεν ephthásamen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | 2 Corinthians 10:14 | 2 |
| φθάσωμεν phthásōmen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural | 1 Thessalonians 4:15 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word φθανω appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 10 verses in 7 books.
- 11
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 10
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 20:34 φθάνω
- 2 Samuel 20:13 φθάνω
- 1 Kings 12:18 φθάνω
- 2 Chronicles 28:9 φθάνω
- Ezra 3:1 φθάνω
- Ecclesiastes 8:14 φθάνω
- Song of Solomon 2:12 φθάνω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5348) 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 20:34 φθάνω There came over against Gibeah ten thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and the battle was sore; but they didn't know that evil was close on them.
- Judges 20:42 φθάνω Therefore they turned their backs before the men of Israel to the way of the wilderness; but the battle followed hard after them; and those who came out of the cities destroyed them in the midst of it.
- 2 Samuel 20:13 φθάνω When he was removed out of the highway, all the people went on after Joab, to pursue after Sheba the son of Bichri.
- 1 Kings 12:18 φθάνω Then king Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the men subject to forced labor; and all Israel stoned him to death with stones. King Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot, to flee to Jerusalem.
- 2 Chronicles 28:9 φθάνω But a prophet of Yahweh was there, whose name was Oded: and he went out to meet the host that came to Samaria, and said to them, Behold, because Yahweh, the God of your fathers, was angry with Judah, he has delivered them into your hand, and you have slain them in a rage which has reached up to heaven.
- Ezra 3:1 φθάνω When the seventh month was come, and the children of Israel were in the cities, the people gathered themselves together as one man to Jerusalem.
- Ezra 17:73 φθάνω
- Ecclesiastes 8:14 φθάνω There is a vanity which is done on the earth, that there are righteous men to whom it happens according to the work of the wicked. Again, there are wicked men to whom it happens according to the work of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity.
- Ecclesiastes 12:1 φθάνω Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, Before the evil days come, and the years draw near, When you will say, "I have no pleasure in them;"
- Song of Solomon 2:12 φθάνω The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing has come, And the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5348) 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.
