מָשׂוֹשׂ
joy
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
3 verses where H4885 appears in the Absolute state in the Book of Isaiah. 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 Hebrew 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 Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 32:13 מָשׂ֔וֹשׂ n c ms On the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yes, on all the houses of joy in the joyous city.
- Isaiah 65:18 מָשֽׂוֹשׂ n c ms But be you glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.
- Isaiah 66:10 מָשׂ֔וֹשׂ n c ms Rejoice you with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her: rejoice for joy with her, all you who mourn over her;
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 Hebrew noun משוש centers on the idea of “joy.” Isaiah dominates its distribution — 9 of 16 verses. Spanning 16 verses in 7 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at Job 8:19, it then recurs through the corpus. The King James Version usually renders it “joy,” while modern versions prefer “joy of” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4885 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 16
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 16 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,671
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,671 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 16 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 9 verses 56%
- Lamentations 2 verses 13%
- Job 1 verse 6%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 16 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 12 verses · 75%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 25%
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: Joy 11×, Mirth 2×
- American Standard Version: Joy 9×, Mirth 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Joy 5×, Joyful 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Joy of 6×, Joy 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4885 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H4885 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 H4885 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H4885 across 17 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.
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense BDB 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.
- exultation, joy, rejoicing
Word origin
n.m. Is 24:8 id.;—abs. מ׳ Is 32:13 +, cstr. מְשׂוֹשׂ Jb 8:19 +; sf. מְשׂוֹשִׂי Je 49:25, מְשׂוֹשָׂהּ Ho 2:13;—exultation, in gen., La 5:15 (opp. אֵבֶל), Is 24:11; 66:10 (acc. cogn.); of bridegroom 62:5; מ׳ תֻּפִּים 24:8, מ׳ כִּנּוֹר v 8; בָּתֵּי מ׳ 32:13; of Jerus. (as causing joy) 60:15 ψ 48:3; La 2:15, cf. Je 49:25 (קִרְיַת מְשׂוֹשִׂי; ‖ תְּהִלָּה), Is 65:18 (‖ גִּילָה); מ׳ דַּרְכּוֹ (of godless man) Jb 8:19; מ׳ פְּרָאִים Is 32:14, i.e. desert.—מ׳ Is 8:6, si vera l., is cstr. before prep., but (מִפְּנֵי) מָסוֹס, Hi Gie Che Du Kit Marti al.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שוש (sûws) (H7797) — to rejoice.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
מָשׁוֹשׁ
- (מוּשׁ or מָשַׁשׁ; cmp. דָּשֹׁושׁ) groper, slow walker.—Pl. מָשֹׁושׁוֹת. Y. Peah VIII, beg. 20ᵈ, v. מוּשׁ h.
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 11 distinct written forms H4885 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| מְשׂ֣וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 24:8 | 3 |
| מְשׂ֥וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 24:8 | 3 |
| מְשׂ֖וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 24:25 | 2 |
| מָשׂ֔וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 32:13 | 2 |
| וּ/מְשׂ֤וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 62:5 | 1 |
| וּ/מְשׂ֥וֹשׂ | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Isaiah 8:6 | 1 |
| מְשׂ֪וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 48:2 | 1 |
| מְשׂוֹשִֽׂ/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 49:25 | 1 |
| מְשׂוֹשָׂ֔/הּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Hosea 2:11 | 1 |
| מָשׂ֖וֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Lamentations 2:15 | 1 |
| מָשֽׂוֹשׂ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 65:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4885, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 15 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 16 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
