ἀπειλέω
to threaten
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).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
Voice
- Middle
- The subject acts on or for itself, or with special interest in the action.
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G546 appears in the Book of Acts — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Acts
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, απειλεω (apeiléō) means “to threaten.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. The word gravitates to Acts (50%), then 1 Peter. Scripture first uses it in Acts 4:17. It shares a root with απειλη. 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 G546 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 50%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 50%
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: He threatened 1×, Threaten 1×
- American Standard Version: Let us threaten 1×, Threatened 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He made no threats 1×, We must warn 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He did 1×, Let us warn 1×, Threaten 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G546 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G546 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G546 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G546 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to threaten, menace
Word origin
Origin: of uncertain derivation
Of uncertain derivation; to menace ; by implication to forbid : - threaten.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G546 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀπειλησώμεθα apeilēsṓmetha | Verb, Aorist, Middle, Subjunctive, 1st person, Plural | Acts 4:17 | 1 |
| ἠπείλει ēpeílei | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | 1 Peter 2:23 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G546, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word απειλεω appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 4 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 27:42 ἀποεἰλέω
- Numbers 23:19 ἀποεἰλέω
- Isaiah 54:9 ἀποεἰλέω
- Nahum 1:4 ἀποεἰλέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G546) 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.
- Genesis 27:42 ἀποεἰλέω The words of Esau, her elder son, were told to Rebekah. She sent and called Jacob her younger son, and said to him, "Behold, your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you.
- Numbers 23:19 ἀποεἰλέω God is not a man, that he should lie, Neither the son of man, that he should repent: Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not make it good?
- Isaiah 54:9 ἀποεἰλέω For this is [as] the waters of Noah to me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah shall no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I will not be angry with you, nor rebuke you.
- Isaiah 66:14 ἀποεἰλέω You shall see [it], and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like the tender grass: and the hand of Yahweh shall be known toward his servants; and he will have indignation against his enemies.
- Nahum 1:4 ἀποεἰλέω He rebukes the sea, and makes it dry, and dries up all the rivers. Bashan languishes, and Carmel; and the flower of Lebanon languishes.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G546) 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.
