ὠδίνω
to travail
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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 2 times (67%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G5605 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Galatians 2 verses
- Galatians 4:19 ὠδίνω pres act ind 1sg My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ is formed in you--
- Galatians 4:27 ὠδίνουσα pres act ptcp nom sg fem For it is written, "Rejoice, you barren who don't bear. Break forth and shout, you that don't travail. For more are the children of the desolate than of her who has a husband."
Revelation 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.
ωδινω — transliterated ōdínō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to travail.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Galatians. Debuting at Galatians 4:19, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 G5605 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.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #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
- Galatians 2 verses 67%
- Revelation 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 67%
- Johannine 1 verse · 33%
- Revelation 1 verse · 33%
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: I travail in birth 1×, Thou that travailest 1×, Travailing in birth 1×
- American Standard Version: She crieth out 1×, Travail 1×, Travailest 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pain 1×, Pains of childbirth 1×, Travailed 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: I am in labor 1×, Suffering birth pains 1×, Suffering the pains of childbirth 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5605 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5605 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5605 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5605 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 feel the pains of child birth, to travail
Word origin
Derived from ωδιν (ōdín) (G5604) — birth pangs.
From G5604 ; to experience the pains of parturition (literally or figuratively): - travail in (birth).
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G5605 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ὠδίνουσα ōdínousa | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Galatians 4:27 | 2 |
| ὠδίνω ōdínō | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Galatians 4:19 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ωδινω appears 15 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 13 verses in 6 books.
- 15
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 13
- 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
- Psalms 7:15 ὠδίνω
- Song of Solomon 8:5 ὠδίνω
- Isaiah 23:4 ὠδίνω
- Jeremiah 4:31 ὠδίνω
- Micah 4:10 ὠδίνω
- Habakkuk 3:10 ὠδίνω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5605) 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.
- Psalms 7:15 ὠδίνω He has dug a hole, And has fallen into the pit which he made.
- Song of Solomon 8:5 ὠδίνω Who is this who comes up from the wilderness, Leaning on her beloved? Under the apple tree I aroused you. There your mother conceived you. There she was in labor and bore you.
- Isaiah 23:4 ὠδίνω Be ashamed, Sidon; for the sea has spoken, the stronghold of the sea, saying, I have not travailed, nor brought forth, neither have I nourished young men, nor brought up virgins.
- Isaiah 26:17 ὠδίνω Like as a woman with child, who draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain and cries out in her pangs; so we have been before you, Yahweh.
- Isaiah 26:18 ὠδίνω We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it were brought forth wind; we have not worked any deliverance in the earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.
- Isaiah 45:10 ὠδίνω Woe to him who says to a father, "What have you become the father of?" or to a woman, "With what do you travail?"
- Isaiah 51:2 ὠδίνω Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you; for when he was but one I called him, and I blessed him, and made him many.
- Isaiah 66:7 ὠδίνω Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she was delivered of a man-child.
- Isaiah 66:8 ὠδίνω Who has heard such a thing? who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? shall a nation be brought forth at once? for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.
- Jeremiah 4:31 ὠδίνω For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, the anguish as of her who brings forth her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, who gasps for breath, who spreads her hands, [saying], Woe is me now! for my soul faints before the murderers.
- Jeremiah 30:16 ὠδίνω Therefore all those who devour you shall be devoured; and all your adversaries, everyone of them, shall go into captivity; and those who despoil you shall be a spoil, and all who prey on you will I give for a prey.
- Micah 4:10 ὠδίνω Be in pain, and labor to bring forth, daughter of Zion, Like a woman in travail; For now you will go forth out of the city, And will dwell in the field, And will come even to Babylon. There you will be rescued. There Yahweh will redeem you from the hand of your enemies.
- Habakkuk 3:10 ὠδίνω The mountains saw you, and were afraid. The tempest of waters passed by. The deep roared and lifted up its hands on high.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5605) 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.
