Word study

Female

4 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: female, females. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.

At a glance

How often each original word is translated “female” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • נְקֵבָה neqêbâhfemaletranslated this way 19 times of its 22 uses · Strong’s H5347Noun  ·  Translated: female 18, daughter 1, female alike 1, women 1

    Genesis 1:27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

    Leviticus 3:1 “If one’s offering is a peace offering and he offers an animal from the herd, whether male or female, he must present it without blemish before the LORD.

    Full study and all 22 verses →
  • אָתוֹן âthônshe-asstranslated this way 4 times of its 31 uses · Strong’s H860Noun  ·  Translated: donkey 12, donkeys 11, female donkeys 4

    Genesis 32:15 30 milk camels with their young, 40 cows, 10 bulls, 20 female donkeys, and 10 male donkeys.

    Job 1:3 and he owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 female donkeys, and a very large number of servants. Job was the greatest man of all the people of the East.

    Full study and all 26 verses →
  • שִׁיר shîrsingtranslated this way 4 times of its 83 uses · Strong’s H7891Verb  ·  Translated: sing 31, singers 25, sang 4, male 3

    2 Chronicles 35:25 Then Jeremiah lamented over Josiah, and to this day all the male and female singers recite laments over Josiah. They established them as a statute for Israel, and indeed they are written in the Book of Laments.

    Ezra 2:65 in addition to their 7,337 menservants and maidservants, as well as their 200 male and female singers.

    Full study and all 76 verses →
  • עֵז êzshe-goattranslated this way 3 times of its 33 uses · Strong’s H5795Noun  ·  Translated: goats 12, goat 10, goat hair 6, female goat 2

    Genesis 30:35 That very day Laban removed all the streaked or spotted male goats and every speckled or spotted female goat— every one that had any white on it— and every dark-colored lamb, and he placed them under the care of his sons.

    Numbers 15:27 Also, if one person sins unintentionally, he is to present a year-old female goat as a sin offering.

    Full study and all 33 verses →

Greek words (New Testament)

  • θῆλυς thēlysfemaletranslated this way 3 times of its 5 uses · Strong’s G2338Adjective  ·  Translated: female 3, women 2

    Matthew 19:4 Jesus answered, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’

    Mark 10:6 However, from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’

    Full study and all 5 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
  2. Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.

Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.