Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

πρόσωπον

face

‘face’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓

G4383 Strong's Greek
prósōpon Transliteration
/pros'-o-pon/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 77 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

προσωπον — transliterated prósōpon — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “face.” Its lexical range runs to 4 senses. The Greek New Testament uses it across 72 verses — moderately common. It first appears in Matthew 6:16. Related forms include προς, προσαγορευω and προσαγω. See the sense tree, 72-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
appearance
Modern gloss
face
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G4383 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 →

72
distinct verses
The word appears in 72 distinct verses.
15 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 15 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 6:16
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 6:16.
Revelation 22:4
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 22:4.
#220
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 220 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 72 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 27 · 38%
  • Acts 11 · 15%
  • Pauline Epistles 20 · 28%
  • General Epistles 5 · 7%
  • Revelation 9 · 13%

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 72 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 27 verses · 38%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 25 verses · 35%
  • Pauline corpus 20 verses · 28%
  • Johannine 9 verses · 13%
  • Revelation 9 verses · 13%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 6%
  • Hebrews 1 verse · 1%

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: Face 48×, Presence 7×, Faces 6×
  • American Standard Version: Face 54×, Faces 5×, Presence 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Face 25×, Presence 7×, Faces 6×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Face 62×, Faces 9×, Of 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4383 across 74 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Face” 48×
  • “Presence” 7×
  • “Faces” 6×
  • “Person” 4×
  • “Countenance” 3×

Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G4383 across 78 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Face” 54×
  • “Faces” 5×
  • “Presence” 5×
  • “Person” 3×
  • “Countenance” 2×
  • “Persons” 2×

Plus 7 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 G4383 across 56 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Face” 25×
  • “Presence” 7×
  • “Faces” 6×
  • “Facedown” 4×
  • “Face to face” 3×
  • “Appearance” 2×

Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 20 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4383 across 80 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Face” 62×
  • “Faces” 9×
  • “Of” 3×
  • “Appearance” 2×
  • “Presence” 2×

Plus 2 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 4 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.

  1. the front of the human head
  2. countenance, look
  3. the appearance one presents by his wealth or property, his rank or low condition
  4. the outward appearance of inanimate things

Word origin

Derived from προς (prós) (G4314).

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 18:49,0

From G4314 and ὤψ ō ps (the visage ; from G3700 ); the front (as being towards view ) that is the countenance aspect appearance surface ; by implication presence person : - (outward) appearance X before countenance face fashion (men´ s) person presence.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 6 distinct written forms G4383 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
πρόσωπον prósōpon Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 16:3 40
προσώπου prosṓpou Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter Matthew 11:10 19
πρόσωπα prósōpa Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Matthew 6:16 7
προσώπῳ prosṓpō Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter 2 Corinthians 2:10 7
πρόσωπόν prósōpón Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 6:17 3
προσώπων prosṓpōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter 2 Corinthians 1:11 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4383, 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

+27 more words share this root (not shown).

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 54 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word προσωπον appears 1,060 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 975 verses in 37 books.

1,060
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
975
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
37 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 37 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4383) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 975. 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 (G4383) 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.