עִי
ruin
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5856 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 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 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Micah 2 verses
- Micah 1:6 לְ/עִ֥י prep + n c ms cs Therefore I will make Samaria like a rubble heap of the field, Like places for planting vineyards; And I will pour down its stones into the valley, And I will uncover its foundations.
- Micah 3:12 עִיִּ֣ין n c mp Therefore Zion for your sake will be plowed like a field, And Jerusalem will become heaps of rubble, And the mountain of the temple like the high places of a forest.
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, עי (ʻîy) means “ruin.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Micah (50% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Psalms 79:1. From the same root come עוה, מעי and עוה. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5856 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 75%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Shall become heaps 2×
- American Standard Version: Shall become heaps 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Heap of rubble 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Heaps 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H5856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H5856 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- ruin, heap of ruins
Word origin
n.[m.] ruin, heap of ruins;—ע׳ abs. Jb 30:24, cstr. Mi 1:6; pl. עִיִּין (Aramaic form) 3:12, but עִיִּים in the quotation Je 26:18, and ψ 79:1.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עוה (ʻâvâh) (H5753) — to twist.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms H5856 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לְ/עִ֥י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Micah 1:6 | 1 |
| לְ/עִיִּֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 79:1 | 1 |
| עִיִּ֣ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 26:18 | 1 |
| עִיִּ֣ין | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Micah 3:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5856, 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
- מעי mᵉʻîy H4596 ruin
- עוה ʻavvâh H5754 distortion
- עויא ʻivyâʼ H5758 perversity
- עון ʻâvôn H5771 iniquity
- עועה ʻavʻeh H5773 distorting
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- עוית ʻĂvîyth H5762 Avith
- עי ʻAy H5857 Ai
- עיון ʻÎyôwn H5859 Ijon
- עיי העברים ʻÎyêy hâ-ʻĂbârîym H5863 Ije-abarim
- עיים ʻÎyîym H5864 Iim
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. 5 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
