φορέω
to wear
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-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).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective 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).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- 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.
4 distinct verses where G5409 appears in the Present tense, across 4 books. 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.
Matthew 1 verse
John 1 verse
Romans 1 verse
James 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.
At its core, φορεω (phoréō) means “to wear.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. First canonically at Matthew 11:8, it enters the text early. 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 G5409 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 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 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 40%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 40%
- Johannine 1 verse · 20%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 20%
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: Bear 1×, He beareth 1×, They that wear 1×
- American Standard Version: Bear 1×, He beareth 1×, We have borne 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He does not carry 1×, In 1×, Shall we bear 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Wearing 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5409 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5409 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5409 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5409 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 1 sense 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.
- of clothing, garments, armour
Word origin
Derived from φορος (phóros) (G5411) — tribute.
From G5411 ; to have a burden that is (by analogy) to wear as clothing or a constant accompaniment : - bear wear.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G5409 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| φορέσωμεν phorésōmen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural | 1 Corinthians 15:49 | 1 |
| φορεῖ phoreî | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Romans 13:4 | 1 |
| φοροῦντα phoroûnta | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | James 2:3 | 1 |
| φοροῦντες phoroûntes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 11:8 | 1 |
| φορῶν phorō̂n | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | John 19:5 | 1 |
| ἐφορέσαμεν ephorésamen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | 1 Corinthians 15:49 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word φορεω appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 2 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- 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
- Exodus 27:6 φορέω
- Proverbs 3:16 φορέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5409) 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 27:6 φορέω You shall make poles for the altar, poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with brass.
- Exodus 27:7 φορέω Its poles shall be put into the rings, and the poles shall be on the two sides of the altar, when carrying it.
- Proverbs 3:16 φορέω Length of days is in her right hand. In her left hand are riches and honor.
- Proverbs 16:19 φορέω It is better to be of a lowly spirit with the poor, Than to divide the plunder with the proud.
- Proverbs 16:22 φορέω Understanding is a fountain of life to one who has it, But the punishment of fools is their folly.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5409) 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.
