שַׂעֲרָה
hair
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.
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 4 times (57%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 2 times (29%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (14%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8185 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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.
Judges 1 verse
1 Samuel 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
1 Kings 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Psalms 2 verses
- Psalms 40:12 מִ/שַּֽׂעֲר֥וֹת prep + n c fp cs For innumerable evils have surrounded me. My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to look up. They are more than the hairs of my head. My heart has failed me.
- Psalms 69:4 מִ/שַּׂעֲר֣וֹת prep + n c fp cs Those who hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of my head. Those who want to cut me off, being my enemies wrongfully, are mighty. I have to restore what I didn't take away.
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 שערה centers on the idea of “hair.” Its earliest occurrence is Judges 20:16. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. Psalms dominates its distribution — 2 of 7 verses. Sharing its root, it stands alongside שער and שער. Dig into 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8185 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 57%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 43%
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: Hair 2×, Shall not one hair 2×, Than the hairs 2×
- American Standard Version: Shall not one hair 2×, Than the hairs 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hair 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hair of 3×, Hair 2×, Than the hairs of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8185 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8185 across 7 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8185 across 7 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8185 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a single hair
Word origin
שַׂעֲרָה n.f. a hair, nom. unit
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שער (sêʻâr) (H8181) — hair.
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.
שֵׂעָר
- preced.) hair. Meg. 18ᵃ, a. e. מסלסל בשׂעַרְךָ, v. סִלְסֵל. Naz. I, 2 הכביד שַׂעֲרוֹ, v. כָּבֵד I. Ib. 4ᵇ לשחת ש׳ וכ׳ to ruin such fine hair; Tosef. ib. IV, 7. Yoma 47ᵃ קלעי שַׂעֲרִי, v. קֶלַע II; a. fr.—Trnsf. crown, ramification of a tree; panicle, stem and pod of leguminous plants. Peah II, 3, a. e. ש׳ כותש, v. כָּתַשׁ; Y. ib. 17ᵃ top סֵעָר. Kil. IV, 9 היה הופך ש׳ שתי וכ׳ he turned the branches of two rows of vines towards one side; B. Bath. 82ᵇ. Sabb. XXI, 3 ש׳ של אפונין וש׳ וכ׳ the panicles (pods) of beans and of lentils. Tosef. Ukts. I, 8 סֵיאָר ed. Zuck. (Var. שיע, read as ed. T’bul Yom III: שיער) the panicle of a pomegranate; a. fr.—Pl., v. שַׂעֲרָה
שַׂעֲרָה
- preced.)
- 1. hair. Y. Sot. I, 16ᶜ top ש׳ אחת one hair; a. e.—Pl. שׂעֲרוֹת. Ib., a. fr. שתי ש׳ (not שני) two hairs (symptom of maturity). Lev. R. s. 20 מעולם לא ראו … ש׳ ראשי the beams of my house never saw the hair of my head (v. קֶלַע II); Y. Yoma I, 38ᵈ top; a. fr.
- 2. ear, panicle. Y. Ter. I, 40ᵈ top ש׳ של אורז (ed. Krot. שְׂעוֹרָה) the panicles of rice.
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 7 distinct written forms H8185 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַֽ/שַּׂעֲרָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 20:16 | 1 |
| מִ/שַּֽׂעֲר֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 40:12 | 1 |
| מִ/שַּׂעֲר֣וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 69:4 | 1 |
| מִ/שַּׂעֲרַ֤ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 14:45 | 1 |
| מִ/שַּׂעֲרַ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 14:11 | 1 |
| מִ/שַּׂעֲרָת֖/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Kings 1:52 | 1 |
| שַֽׂעֲרַ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Job 4:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8185, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
