In short: James Strong numbered every distinct Hebrew and Aramaic word in the Old Testament (H1 to H8674) and every Greek word in the New Testament (G1 to G5624) for his Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1890). The prefix says which language; the number names a dictionary word, not a meaning.
Where Strong’s numbers come from
James Strong (1822–1894) was an American Methodist scholar. His Exhaustive Concordance listed every word of the King James Version and every verse it appears in. At the back he added two short dictionaries, A Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible and A Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Greek Testament, and gave each word a number. A reader who knew no Hebrew could find the number beside an English word in the concordance and turn to the dictionary.
The numbers outlived the book. Interlinears, lexicons and Bible software still key their entries to them, which is why they remain the easiest way into the original languages. The dictionaries are in the public domain.
How the numbers work
- H means Hebrew (including the Aramaic words in the Old Testament), G means Greek. The prefix matters: H1 is אָב, “father”; G1 is the letter alpha.
- The numbers follow the alphabetical order of the original-language words, not the order they appear in the Bible.
- The Greek numbers run to 5624, but not every number is used: Strong left G2717 and G3203–G3302 empty, so there are 5,523 Greek entries.
- One number covers every form of the word. Whether a Greek verb appears as a command, a participle or a past tense, it carries the same number.
How to read a Strong’s entry
The first word of the Bible, “In the beginning” in Genesis 1:1, translates בְּרֵאשִׁית. Its dictionary form, רֵאשִׁית, is Strong’s H7225. The entry reads:
H7225 רֵאשִׁית rêʼshîyth
from the same as H7218; the first, in place, time, order or rank (specifically, a firstfruit):--beginning, chief(-est), first(-fruits, part, time), principal thing.
- The word and its transliteration: רֵאשִׁית, rêʼshîyth.
- Its derivation: “from the same as H7218” points to a related word (H7218, רֹאשׁ, “head”).
- A short definition: “the first, in place, time, order or rank.”
- After the “:--”, the English words the King James Version used to translate it. That list describes the KJV, not the full range of the Hebrew word.
In the Berean Standard Bible, H7225 occurs 51 times. Reading those verses is how you learn what the word means.
A Greek example: λόγος in John 1:1
“In the beginning was the Word”: Word is λόγος, G3056, one of the most common nouns in the New Testament, used more than 300 times. Strong’s defines it as “something said (including the thought); by implication, a topic (subject of discourse), also reasoning (the mental faculty) or motive,” and adds that “(with the article in John)” it is “the Divine Expression (i.e. Christ).” A frequent word like this is where a short definition helps least and reading the occurrences in context helps most.
Where Strong’s falls short
- The definitions are brief. Strong wrote a finding aid, not a full lexicon. For depth, read Brown-Driver-Briggs (1906) for Hebrew and Thayer’s (1889) for Greek, both keyed to Strong’s numbers.
- It reflects the King James Version. The English renderings are the KJV’s, and the Greek entries follow the text behind it, so a few words in modern Greek editions are numbered awkwardly or not at all.
- A number is not a meaning. The same number covers every sense of a word. Which sense a verse uses is decided by the context, not the number.
- Modern lexicons group some words differently, so a number occasionally covers forms a newer dictionary separates, or the reverse.
Strong’s numbers in Rightly
Tap any word in the Berean Standard Bible and the word sheet shows its Strong’s number, the Strong’s entry, the fuller BDB or Thayer’s entry, and every other verse with the same number — offline, and free (see the word sheet). To put it to use, follow our step-by-step Greek word study.