κολοβόω
to shorten
‘to shorten’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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).
- 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).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G2856 appears — 2 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.
Matthew 1 verse
Mark 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.
κολοβοω (kolobóō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to shorten.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. It clusters heavily in Matthew, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Debuting at Matthew 24:22, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G2856 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 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 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 100%
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: Had shortened 1×, He hath shortened 1×, Shall be shortened 1×
- American Standard Version: Had been shortened 1×, Had shortened 1×, He shortened 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Had not been cut short 1×, Had not cut short 1×, He has cut them short 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Been shortened 1×, Did 1×, Had 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G2856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G2856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G2856 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G2856 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 senses 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 mutilate
- in NT: to shorten, abridge, curtail
Word origin
Derived from κολαζω (kolázō) (G2849) — to punish.
From a derivative of the base of G2849 ; to dock that is (figuratively) abridge : - shorten.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G2856 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐκολόβωσεν ekolóbōsen | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Mark 13:20 | 2 |
| κολοβωθήσονται kolobōthḗsontai | Verb, Future, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Matthew 24:22 | 1 |
| ἐκολοβώθησαν ekolobṓthēsan | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Matthew 24:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2856, 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
- κολασις kólasis G2851 punishment
- κολαφιζω kolaphízō G2852 to strike
- κωλον kōlon G2966 member
- κωλυω kōlýō G2967 to hinder
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 κολοβοω appears 1 time in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 1 verse in 1 book.
- 1
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 1
- verse
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 2 Samuel 4:12 κολοβόω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2856) 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.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2856) 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.
