ἐκμάσσω
to wipe away
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 3 times (60%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G1591 appears — 5 distinct verses across 2 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 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.
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 7:38 ἐξέμαξεν aor act ind 3sg Standing behind at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and she wiped them with the hair of her head, kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.
- Luke 7:44 ἐξέμαξεν aor act ind 3sg Turning to the woman, he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered into your house, and you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head.
John 3 verses
- John 11:2 ἐκμάξασα aor act ptcp nom sg fem It was that Mary who had anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother, Lazarus, was sick.
- John 12:3 ἐξέμαξεν aor act ind 3sg Mary, therefore, took a pound of ointment of pure nard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment.
- John 13:5 ἐκμάσσειν pres act inf Then he poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.
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.
εκμασσω — transliterated ekmássō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to wipe away.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. More than half of its appearances fall in John. Debuting at Luke 7:38, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with εκ, εκβαλλω and εκβασις. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1591 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,648
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,648 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 100%
- Johannine 3 verses · 60%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 40%
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: Wiped 3×
- American Standard Version: Wiped 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Wipe 2×, Wiped 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dry them 1×, Having wiped 1×, She was wiping them 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1591 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G1591 across 5 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 G1591 across 5 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1591 across 5 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.
- to wipe off, to wipe away
Word origin
Derived from εκ (ek) (G1537) — from.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G1591 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐξέμαξεν exémaxen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 7:38 | 3 |
| ἐκμάξασα ekmáxasa | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | John 11:2 | 1 |
| ἐκμάσσειν ekmássein | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | John 13:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G1591, 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
- εκβαλλω ekbállō G1544 to cast out
- εκβασις ékbasis G1545 exit
- εκγαμιζω ekgamízō G1547 to give in marriage
- εκγαμισκω ekgamískō G1548 to give in marriage
- εκγονον ékgonon G1549 offspring
- εκδαπαναω ekdapanáō G1550 to spend
- εκδεχομαι ekdéchomai G1551 to receive
- εκδηλος ékdēlos G1552 evident
- εκδημεω ekdēméō G1553 to depart
- εκδιδωμι ekdídōmi G1554 to give out
- εκδιηγεομαι ekdiēgéomai G1555 to relate
- εκδικος ékdikos G1558 without justice
- εκδιωκω ekdiṓkō G1559 to banish
- εκδοτος ékdotos G1560 delivered up
- εκδυω ekdýō G1562 to put off
- εκζητεω ekzētéō G1567 to seek out
- εκθαμβος ékthambos G1569 astonished
- εκθετος ékthetos G1570 exposed
- εκκαθαιρω ekkathaírō G1571 to cleanse
- εκκαιω ekkaíō G1572 to burn
- εκκακεω ekkakéō G1573 to be exhausted
- εκκεντεω ekkentéō G1574 to pierce
- εκκλαω ekkláō G1575 to cut off
- εκκλειω ekkleíō G1576 to shut out
+88 more words share this root (not shown).
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 114 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
