πνίγω
to strangle
‘to strangle’ 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 Imperfect-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).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
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
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
1 distinct verse where G4155 appears in the Aorist tense, 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.
Matthew 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.
The Greek verb πνιγω centers on the idea of “to strangle.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. Matthew dominates its distribution — 2 of 3 verses. First canonically at Matthew 13:7, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4155 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.
- #2,203
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Gospels 3 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: Took him by the throat 1×, Were choked 1×
- American Standard Version: They were drowned 1×, Throat 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Began to choke 1×, Choked 1×, Drowned 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He choked 1×, Him 1×, Were drowned 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4155 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4155 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4155 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4155 across 3 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.
- of thorns crowding out the seed in the field and hindering its growth
- to wring one's neck, throttle
Word origin
Derived from πνεω (pnéō) (G4154) — to breathe.
strengthened from G4154 ; to wheeze that is (causative by implication) to throttle or strangle ( drown ): - choke take by the throat.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G4155 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐπνίγοντο epnígonto | Verb, Imperfect, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Mark 5:13 | 1 |
| ἔπνιγεν épnigen | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 18:28 | 1 |
| ἔπνιξαν épnixan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Matthew 13:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4155, 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 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πνιγω appears 2 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 2 verses in 1 book.
- 2
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 2
- verses
- 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 Samuel 16:14 πνίγω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4155) 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.
- 1 Samuel 16:14 πνίγω Now the Spirit of Yahweh departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from Yahweh troubled him.
- 1 Samuel 16:15 πνίγω Saul's servants said to him, See now, an evil spirit from God troubles you.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4155) 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.
