שְׂחֹק
laughter
also: laughing stock, mocking, derision fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
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
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7814 appears in the Book of Lamentations — 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 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.
Lamentations
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.
שחוק — transliterated sᵉchôwq — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “laughter.” Not a single-sense word: its full sense range also takes in “laughing stock”, “mocking”, and “derision”. It appears 14 verses across 6 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Ecclesiastes. Its earliest occurrence is Job 8:21. 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 H7814 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,836
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,836 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 14 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ecclesiastes 4 verses 29%
- Jeremiah 4 verses 29%
- Job 2 verses 14%
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 14 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 10 verses · 71%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 29%
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: Laughter 4×
- American Standard Version: Laughter 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Laughter 5×, Laughingstock 4×, Object of ridicule 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Laughter 7×, Laughingstock 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7814 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 H7814 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 H7814 across 15 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7814 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 3 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. laughter (joyous) Jb 8:21 (‖ תְּרוּעָה), ψ 126:2 (‖ רִנָּה), Ec 2:2 (‖ שִׂמְחָה), 10:19 (‖ שִׂמֵּחַ); as hollow Pr 14:13 (opp. כָּאַב), Ec 7:3 (opp. כַּעַס), cf. שׂ׳ הַכְּסִיל v 6. e.g. Job 8:21
- 2. (object of) derision, הָיָה לִשׂ׳, Je 20:7; 48:26, 27 (read לִשׂ׳ for MT הַשּׂ׳ 𝔊 𝔖 𝔙 Gie Du; Co del. vv), v 39 La 3:14; elsewhere Jb 12:4(×2). e.g. Jeremiah 20:7
- 3. sport Pr 10:23. e.g. Proverbs 10:23
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.[m.] laughter, derision, sport (proposes inf. cstr.);—abs. שְׂחֹק Je 48:26 + 5 times; cstr. Ec 7:6; abs. שְׂחוֹק Je 20:7 + 7 times;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שחק (sâchaq) (H7832) — to laugh.
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.
שְׂחוֹק
- laughter, sport, jest. Ab. III, 13, v. קַלּוּת. Ex. R. s. 42 (ref. to לצחק, Ex. XXXII, 6) אין ש׳ האמור כאן וכ׳ the sport here mentioned means idolatry, debauchery, and bloodshed; ומנין לש׳ שהוא וכ׳ and whence is it proved that ‘sport’ refers to bloodshed? (Answ. ref. to II Sam. II, 14). Y. Peah I, 16ᵃ bot. שעשה דמן … ש׳ he (Abner) made the blood of lads an object of sport (ref. to II Sam. l. c.). Ber. 31ᵃ אסוֹר לאדם … ש׳ פיו וכ׳ man should not fill his mouth with laughter in this world (of oppression). Ib. מתוך ש׳ in a mood of laughter, v. עֲצֵבוּת; Y. ib. V, beg. 8ᵈ. Pes. 117ᵃ; Sabb. 30ᵇ אין שכינה … מתוך ש׳ וכ׳ holy inspiration does not rest upon man when he is in a mood of grief, or indolence, or laughter &c. Ib. (ref. to Koh. VII, 3) טוב כעס … מש׳ שמשחק וכ׳ better is the anger the Lord shows the righteous (by trials) in this world, than the laughter the Lord laughs with the wicked (when he makes them prosper) in this world. Cant. R. to VI, 11 מה אגוז זה ש׳ … ושעשוע וכ׳ as the nut is a plaything for children and an entertainment for kings, so is Israel &c.; a. fr.—Erub. 65ᵇ אף בשַׂחֲקוֹ man’s character is also recognized in his jesting.—[Yalk. Ps. 620 ד׳ שחוק הן, v. שְׂחִיקָה.]—Pl. שְׂחוֹקִים. Koh. R. to X, 19 (ref. to לשחוק עושים לחם ib.) לש׳ של יראות עושים לחם for the revelries of idolatries they prepare bread, but the wine &c. e.g. Exodus 32:6
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 14 distinct written forms H7814 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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 11 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 14 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.
