ἐξουσιάζω
to have authority
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Present-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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
2 distinct verses where G1850 appears in the Present tense, across 2 books. 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.
Luke 1 verse
1 Corinthians 1 verse
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.
“to have authority” is the headline sense of the Greek verb εξουσιαζω (exousiázō). It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in 1 Corinthians, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. It first appears in Luke 22:25. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G1850 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 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 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Corinthians 2 verses 67%
- Luke 1 verse 33%
By section of the New Testament
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 3 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 67%
- Gospels 1 verse · 33%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 33%
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: Hath 2×, Power 2×
- American Standard Version: Hath 2×, Power 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Have authority over 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Does 2×, Have authority over 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G1850 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G1850 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G1850 across 4 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G1850 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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 have power or authority, use power
Word origin
Derived from εξουσια (exousía) (G1849) — authority.
From G1849 ; to control : - exercise authority upon bring under the (have) power of.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G1850 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐξουσιάζει exousiázei | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 7:4 | 2 |
| ἐξουσιάζοντες exousiázontes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 22:25 | 1 |
| ἐξουσιασθήσομαι exousiasthḗsomai | Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | 1 Corinthians 6:12 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word εξουσιαζω appears 13 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 13 verses in 2 books.
- 13
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 13
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Ezra 7:24 ἐξουσιάζω
- Ecclesiastes 2:19 ἐξουσιάζω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G1850) 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.
- Ezra 7:24 ἐξουσιάζω Also we inform you, that touching any of the priests and Levites, the singers, porters, Nethinim, or servants of this house of God, it shall not be lawful to impose tribute, custom, or toll, on them.
- Ezra 15:15 ἐκοὐσιάζω
- Ezra 19:37 ἐκοὐσιάζω
- Ecclesiastes 2:19 ἐξουσιάζω Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have rule over all of my labor in which I have labored, and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity.
- Ecclesiastes 5:18 ἐξουσιάζω Behold, that which I have seen to be good and proper is for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy good in all his labor, in which he labors under the sun, all the days of his life which God has given him; for this is his portion.
- Ecclesiastes 6:2 ἐξουσιάζω a man to whom God gives riches, wealth, and honor, so that he lacks nothing for his soul of all that he desires, yet God gives him no power to eat of it, but an alien eats it. This is vanity, and it is an evil disease.
- Ecclesiastes 7:19 ἐξουσιάζω Wisdom is a strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city.
- Ecclesiastes 8:4 ἐξουσιάζω for the king's word is supreme. Who can say to him, "What are you doing?"
- Ecclesiastes 8:8 ἐξουσιάζω There is no man who has power over the spirit to contain the spirit; neither does he have power over the day of death. There is no discharge in war; neither shall wickedness deliver those who practice it.
- Ecclesiastes 8:9 ἐξουσιάζω All this have I seen, and applied my mind to every work that is done under the sun. There is a time in which one man has power over another to his hurt.
- Ecclesiastes 9:17 ἐξουσιάζω The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the cry of him who rules among fools.
- Ecclesiastes 10:4 ἐξουσιάζω If the spirit of the ruler rises up against you, don't leave your place; for gentleness lays great offenses to rest.
- Ecclesiastes 10:5 ἐξουσιάζω There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, the sort of error which proceeds from the ruler.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G1850) 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.
