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ἄρτος

bread

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

G740 Strong's Greek
ártos Transliteration
/ar'-tos/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 97 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.

“bread” is the headline sense of the Greek noun αρτος (ártos). Scripture first uses it in Matthew 4:3. It appears 89 verses across 9 books of the Greek New Testament, among its moderately common vocabulary. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. It shares a root with αιρω, αιρεομαι and αρα. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
bread
Modern gloss
bread
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G740 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 →

89
distinct verses
The word appears in 89 distinct verses.
9 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 9 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 4:3
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 4:3.
Hebrews 9:2
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Hebrews 9:2.
#174
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 174 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 89 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 74 · 83%
  • Acts 5 · 6%
  • Pauline Epistles 9 · 10%
  • General Epistles 1 · 1%
  • 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 89 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 74 verses · 83%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 21 verses · 24%
  • Johannine 20 verses · 22%
  • Pauline corpus 9 verses · 10%
  • Hebrews 1 verse · 1%

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: Bread 70×, Loaves 22×, Shewbread 3×
  • American Standard Version: Bread 61×, Loaves 23×, The 9×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Bread 60×, Loaves 20×, Consecrated bread 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bread 53×, Loaves 38×, Bread loaves 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G740 across 98 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bread” 70×
  • “Loaves” 22×
  • “Shewbread” 3×

Plus 3 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.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G740 across 104 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bread” 61×
  • “Loaves” 23×
  • “The” 9×
  • “' worth of bread” 2×
  • “'s bread” 2×
  • “Loaf” 2×
  • “Showbread” 2×

Plus 3 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 G740 across 90 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bread” 60×
  • “Loaves” 20×
  • “Consecrated bread” 3×
  • “Loaf” 3×
  • “Food” 2×
  • “Loaves of bread” 2×

Not rendered by a distinct English word in 7 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G740 across 97 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bread” 53×
  • “Loaves” 38×
  • “Bread loaves” 3×

Plus 3 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 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. food composed of flour mixed with water and baked
  2. food of any kind

Word origin

Derived from αιρω (aírō) (G142) — to raise up.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TDNT: 08:57,8

From G142 ; bread (as raised ) or a loaf : - (shew-) bread loaf.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 8 distinct written forms G740 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
ἄρτον árton Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 6:11 39
ἄρτους ártous Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 12:4 30
ἄρτος ártos Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Luke 4:3 10
ἄρτων ártōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine Matthew 16:11 6
ἄρτου ártou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Luke 24:35 5
ἄρτοι ártoi Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine Matthew 4:3 4
ἄρτῳ ártō Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 4:4 2
ἄρτοις ártois Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine Mark 6:52 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G740, 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 → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word αρτος appears 265 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 242 verses in 29 books.

265
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
242
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
29 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 29 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G740) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 242. 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 (G740) 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.