φθορά
corruption
also: destruction, perishing fuller range ↓
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.”
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
1 distinct verse where G5356 appears in the Nominative case, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
1 Corinthians 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.
“corruption” is the headline sense of the Greek noun φθορα (phthorá). The King James Version usually renders it “corruption,” while modern versions prefer “destruction” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. With 8 verses in 5 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. It concentrates in 2 Peter, which alone accounts for 38% of its uses. Not a single-sense word, it carries 2 senses, among them “destruction” and “perishing”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5356 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 5 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 5 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,140
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,140 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Peter 3 verses 38%
- 1 Corinthians 2 verses 25%
- Romans 1 verse 13%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 5 verses · 63%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 3 verses · 38%
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: Corruption 7×
- American Standard Version: Corruption 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Perishable 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Destruction 5×, Decay 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5356 across 9 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 G5356 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G5356 across 8 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5356 across 9 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.
- corruption, destruction, perishing
- in the NT, in an ethical sense, corruption i.e. moral decay
Word origin
Derived from φθειρω (phtheírō) (G5351) — to corrupt.
From G5351 ; decay that is ruin (spontaneous or inflicted literally or figuratively): - corruption destroy perish.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms G5356 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| φθορᾶς phthorâs | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Romans 8:21 | 3 |
| φθοράν phthorán | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Galatians 6:8 | 2 |
| φθορᾷ phthorâ | Noun, Dative, Singular, Feminine | 1 Corinthians 15:42 | 2 |
| φθορὰ phthorà | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | 1 Corinthians 15:50 | 1 |
| φθορὰν phthoràn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Colossians 2:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5356, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word φθορα appears 7 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 7 verses in 6 books.
- 7
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 7
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 18:18 φθορά
- Psalms 102:4 φθορά
- Isaiah 24:3 φθορά
- Daniel 3:92 φθορά
- Jonah 2:7 φθορά
- Micah 2:10 φθορά
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5356) 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.
- Exodus 18:18 φθορά You will surely wear away, both you, and this people that is with you; for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to perform it yourself alone.
- Psalms 102:4 φθορά My heart is blighted like grass, and withered, For I forget to eat my bread.
- Isaiah 24:3 φθορά The earth shall be utterly emptied, and utterly laid waste; for Yahweh has spoken this word.
- Daniel 3:92 φθορά
- Daniel 10:8 φθορά So I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me; for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength.
- Jonah 2:7 φθορά "When my soul fainted within me, I remembered Yahweh. My prayer came in to you, into your holy temple.
- Micah 2:10 φθορά Arise, and depart! For this is not your resting place, Because of uncleanness that destroys, Even with a grievous destruction.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5356) 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.
