δεσμωτήριον
prison
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Accusative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
2 distinct verses where G1201 appears in the Accusative case, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek 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 Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
Acts 2 verses
- Acts 5:21 δεσμωτήριον n acc sg neut When they heard this, they entered into the temple about daybreak, and taught. But the high priest came, and those who were with him, and called the council together, and all the senate of the children of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought.
- Acts 5:23 δεσμωτήριον n acc sg neut "We found the prison shut and locked, and the guards standing before the doors, but when we opened them, we found no one inside!"
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.
δεσμωτηριον — transliterated desmōtḗrion — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “prison.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Greek New Testament. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Acts. It first appears in Matthew 11:2. Related forms include δεσμον, δεσμεω and δεσμιος. 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 G1201 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,877
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,877 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 4 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 3 verses · 75%
- Gospels 1 verse · 25%
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: Prison 4×
- American Standard Version: Prison-house 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Jail 2×, Prison 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Prison 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1201 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1201 across 3 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1201 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1201 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 1 sense Thayer's 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 prison, a jail
Word origin
Derived from δεσμον (desmón) (G1199) — bond.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G1201 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| δεσμωτήριον desmōtḗrion | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter | Acts 5:21 | 2 |
| δεσμωτηρίου desmōtēríou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter | Acts 16:26 | 1 |
| δεσμωτηρίῳ desmōtēríō | Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter | Matthew 11:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1201, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word δεσμωτηριον appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 7 verses in 3 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 7
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 39:22 δεσμωτήριον
- Judges 16:21 δεσμωτήριον
- Isaiah 24:22 δεσμωτήριον
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1201) appears in the Greek Septuagint. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 39:22 δεσμωτήριον The keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the prisoners who were in the prison. Whatever they did there, he was the doer of it.
- Genesis 39:23 δεσμωτήριον The keeper of the prison didn't look after anything that was under his hand, because Yahweh was with him; and that which he did, Yahweh made it prosper.
- Genesis 40:3 δεσμωτήριον He put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, into the prison, the place where Joseph was bound.
- Genesis 40:5 δεσμωτήριον They both dreamed a dream, each man his dream, in one night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were bound in the prison.
- Judges 16:21 δεσμωτήριον The Philistines laid hold on him, and put out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison-house.
- Judges 16:25 δεσμωτήριον It happened, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. They called for Samson out of the prison-house; and he made sport before them. They set him between the pillars:
- Isaiah 24:22 δεσμωτήριον They shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison; and after many days shall they be visited.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1201) in the Septuagint — not a translation of any one Hebrew word. The store carries no word-level Hebrew↔Greek alignment, so no Hebrew original is asserted here. Counts come from the recovered LXX Strong's tagging — high-frequency vocabulary is well covered, while rare or late forms may be untagged — so they reflect tagged occurrences and may slightly undercount.
