οπτανομαι
to look at
‘to look at’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
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).
Voice
- Middle or Passive deponent
- Middle/passive in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G3700 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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 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.
οπτανομαι — transliterated optánomai — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to look at.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Greek New Testament. Its uses cluster heavily in Acts (100% of all occurrences). Its lone occurrence is Acts 1:3. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. 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 G3700 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 of 27 New Testament books.
- #3,503
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 3,503 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 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: Appeared 13×, Shall see 6×, Ye shall see 6×
- American Standard Version: Appeared 10×, Shall see 7×, Ye shall see 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: He appeared 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Appearing 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3700 across 60 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 14 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 G3700 across 59 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 16 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 G3700 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G3700 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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 look at, behold
- to allow one's self to be seen, to appear
Word origin
Derived from οραω (horáō) (G3708) — to see.
the first a (middle voice) prolonged form of the second (primary) which is used for it in certain tenses; and both as alternates of G3708 ; to gaze (that is with wide open eyes as at something remarkable; and thus differing from G991 which denotes simply voluntary observation; and from G1492 which expresses merely mechanical passive or casual vision; while G2300 and still more emphatically its intensive G2334 signifies an earnest but more continued inspection ; and G4648 a watching from a distance ): - appear look see shew self.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3700, 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
- ομμα ómma G3659 eye
- οπη opḗ G3692 opening
- οπισθεν ópisthen G3693 behind
- οπτασια optasía G3701 vision
- οραω horáō G3708 to see
- οφθαλμος ophthalmós G3788 eye
- οφις óphis G3789 serpent
- οφρυς ophrŷs G3790 eyebrow
- οψις ópsis G3799 face
- σκυθρωπος skythrōpós G4659 sad-faced
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 15 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word οπτανομαι 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
- 1 Kings 8:8 ὀπτάνω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3700) 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 (G3700) 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.
