The 100 most common New Testament Greek words

A small number of words carries most of the Greek New Testament. Learn these hundred lemmas and you will recognise a large share of the words on any page you open, which is why almost every first-year Greek course front-loads them. Each entry below pairs the dictionary form with a short clause from the New Testament itself, so the word arrives already attached to a sentence rather than floating on a card.

How to use this list

Read straight down the list and mark only the words you could not have produced yourself. Everything you already know is already yours, and reviewing it is wasted effort; the marked words are your actual study list. Every example is a real verse with its reference, so you can open any Bible, find the passage, and see the word doing its work in context. Expect the examples to show inflected forms rather than the dictionary form, since that is how the words actually appear.

The 100 words

The ones English speakers get wrong

οὐ and μή: two ways to say no

Greek chooses its negative by mood, not by meaning. οὐ (with its forms οὐκ and οὐχ) negates the indicative, the mood of plain statement, as in “οὐ γὰρ ἐπαισχύνομαι” (Rom 1:16), I am not ashamed. μή negates almost everything else, including commands and subjunctives, as in “μὴ φοβοῦ” (Mark 5:36), do not fear. When you meet a negative, look at the verb form first and the negative second.

δέ, καί, and ἀλλά: three different joints

καί simply adds, δέ marks a mild step or shift and often needs nothing stronger than a comma in English, and ἀλλά contradicts what came before. Compare “ὁ μὲν θερισμὸς πολύς, οἱ δὲ ἐργάται ὀλίγοι” (Matt 9:37), where δέ balances two halves, with “ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ παντὶ ῥήματι” (Matt 4:4), where ἀλλά cancels the previous claim. Translating every δέ as “but” is the most common way beginners make Greek sound quarrelsome.

λόγος is wider than word

λόγος can mean a single word, but far more often it means a message, a statement, an account, or a reason. In “ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος” (John 1:1) it is a title, while elsewhere the same noun covers the whole preached message or even a financial reckoning. If “word” sounds thin in a passage, try message, account, or matter and see which one carries the sentence.

ἵνα and ὅτι both look like that

ὅτι introduces a fact or a reason and takes the indicative, as in “ὅτι αὐτὸς πρῶτος ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς” (1 John 4:19), because he first loved us. ἵνα introduces a purpose or result and normally takes the subjunctive, as in “ἵνα ζωὴν ἔχωσιν” (John 10:10), so that they may have life. The mood of the following verb is your fastest clue.

ἐκ and ἀπό: out of versus away from

Both take the genitive and both are often rendered “from”, but ἐκ pictures motion out of an interior while ἀπό pictures separation from a point or surface. Compare “ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου” (John 18:36), out of this world as its source, with “ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ” (Matt 6:13), away from the evil one. In Koine the two overlap, so read the picture rather than enforcing a rule.

τίς and τις: one accent apart

The same three letters give you a question word and an indefinite pronoun, and only the accent separates them. Accented τίς asks, as in “τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια;” (John 18:38), what is truth. Unaccented enclitic τις means someone or a certain one, as in “ἄνθρωπος δέ τις ἦν πλούσιος” (Luke 16:19), now there was a certain rich man. Word order helps too, since the question word tends to come first and the indefinite rarely does.

What to do next

A list this size is about two weeks of light daily review, and it is the difference between decoding Koine Greek and following it.