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φοβερός

fearsome

‘fearsome’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G5398 Strong's Greek
phoberós Transliteration
/fob-er-os'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 3 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

“fearsome” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective φοβερος (phoberós). The Greek New Testament uses it only 3 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Hebrews. Scripture first uses it in Hebrews 10:27. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
fearful
Modern gloss
fearsome
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G5398 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 →

3
distinct verses
The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
1 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
Hebrews 10:27
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Hebrews 10:27.
Hebrews 12:21
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Hebrews 12:21.
#2,203
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 0 · 0%
  • Acts 0 · 0%
  • Pauline Epistles 0 · 0%
  • General Epistles 3 · 100%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 3 distinct verses.

  • Hebrews 3 verses · 100%

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: Fearful 1×, Is a fearful thing 1×, Terrible 1×
  • American Standard Version: Fearful 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Fearful 1×, Fearful thing 1×, Terrifying 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fearful 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G5398 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Fearful” 1×
  • “Is a fearful thing” 1×
  • “Terrible” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G5398 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Fearful” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G5398 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Fearful” 1×
  • “Fearful thing” 1×
  • “Terrifying” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G5398 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Fearful” 2×

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.

  1. inspiring fear, terrible, formidable
  2. affected with fear, timid

Word origin

Derived from φοβος (phóbos) (G5401) — fear.

Part of speech: Adjective

From G5401 ; frightful that is (objectively) formidable : - fearful terrible.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 2 distinct written forms G5398 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
φοβερὸν phoberòn Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Hebrews 10:31 2
φοβερὰ phoberà Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Feminine Hebrews 10:27 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5398, 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 φοβερος appears 29 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 28 verses in 10 books.

29
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
28
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
10 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 10 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5398) 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.

These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5398) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.