φωνέω
to sound
also: emit a sound, to speak fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
1 distinct verse where G5455 appears in the Imperfect tense, 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.
Luke 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.
The Greek verb φωνεω centers on the idea of “to sound.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “called” in the King James Version, “crows” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It turns up in 39 verses across 6 books, a moderately common footprint. The word gravitates to John (31%), then Luke and Mark. Thayer's distinguishes 5 senses; alongside “to sound” it spans “emit a sound” and “to speak”. Dig into 39-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5455 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 →
- 39
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 39 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #347
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 347 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 39 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 39 distinct verses.
- Gospels 34 verses · 87%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 14 verses · 36%
- Johannine 13 verses · 33%
- Revelation 1 verse · 3%
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: Called 8×, Crow 7×, Crew 5×
- American Standard Version: Called 7×, Crow 7×, Crew 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Called 6×, Crows 6×, Crowed 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Crows 5×, Crowed 4×, Call 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5455 across 44 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G5455 across 44 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G5455 across 41 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 G5455 across 46 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 17 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 5 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 sound, emit a sound, to speak
- to call, to call one's self, either by one's own voice or though another
- to call out of (i.e. bid one to quit a place and come to one
- to invite
- to address, accost, call by a name
Word origin
Derived from φωνη (phōnḗ) (G5456) — voice.
From G5456 ; to emit a sound (animal human or instrumental); by implication to address in words or by name also in imitation : - call (for) crow cry.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 17 distinct written forms G5455 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word φωνεω appears 13 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 12 verses in 7 books.
- 13
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 12
- 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
- 1 Chronicles 15:16 φωνέω
- Psalms 113:15 φωνέω
- Isaiah 8:19 φωνέω
- Jeremiah 17:11 φωνέω
- Daniel 4:7 φωνέω
- Amos 3:6 φωνέω
- Zephaniah 2:14 φωνέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5455) 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.
- 1 Chronicles 15:16 φωνέω David spoke to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brothers the singers, with instruments of music, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding aloud and lifting up the voice with joy.
- Psalms 113:15 φωνέω
- Psalms 134:17 φωνέω
- Isaiah 8:19 φωνέω When they shall tell you, "Consult with those who have familiar spirits and with the wizards, who chirp and who mutter:" shouldn't a people consult with their God? on behalf of the living [should they consult] with the dead?
- Isaiah 19:3 φωνέω The spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst of it; and I will destroy the counsel of it: and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to those who have familiar spirits, and to the wizards.
- Isaiah 29:4 φωνέω You shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and your speech shall be low out of the dust; and your voice shall be as of one who has a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and your speech shall whisper out of the dust.
- Isaiah 38:14 φωνέω Like a swallow [or] a crane, so did I chatter; I did moan as a dove; my eyes fail [with looking] upward: Lord, I am oppressed, be my collateral.
- Jeremiah 17:11 φωνέω As the partridge that sits on [eggs] which she has not laid, so is he who gets riches, and not by right; in the midst of his days they shall leave him, and at his end he shall be a fool.
- Daniel 4:7 φωνέω Then came in the magicians, the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers; and I told the dream before them; but they did not make known to me the interpretation of it.
- Daniel 5:7 φωνέω The king cried aloud to bring in the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. The king spoke and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whoever shall read this writing, and show me the interpretation of it, shall be clothed with purple, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
- Amos 3:6 φωνέω Does the trumpet alarm sound in a city, Without the people being afraid? Does evil happen to a city, And Yahweh hasn't done it?
- Zephaniah 2:14 φωνέω Herds will lie down in the midst of her, all the animals of the nations. Both the pelican and the porcupine will lodge in its capitals. Their calls will echo through the windows. Desolation will be in the thresholds, for he has laid bare the cedar beams.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5455) 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.
