πυνθάνομαι
to ask
‘to ask’ 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
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Middle or Passive deponent
- Middle/passive in form but active in meaning.
- Middle deponent
- Middle in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
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.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Imperfect, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 5 times (45%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 2 times (18%)
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (9%)
- Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 1 time (9%)
- Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (9%)
- Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Infinitive 1 time (9%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 11 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G4441 appears — 11 distinct verses across 4 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
Luke 2 verses
John 1 verse
Acts 7 verses
- Acts 4:7 ἐπυνθάνοντο impf mid/pass.dep ind 3pl When they had stood them in the middle of them, they inquired, "By what power, or in what name, have you done this?"
- Acts 10:18 ἐπυνθάνοντο impf mid/pass.dep ind 3pl and called and asked whether Simon, who was surnamed Peter, was lodging there.
- Acts 10:29 πυνθάνομαι pres mid/pass.dep ind 1sg Therefore also I came without complaint when I was sent for. I ask therefore, why did you send for me?"
- Acts 21:33 ἐπυνθάνετο impf mid/pass.dep ind 3sg Then the commanding officer came near, arrested him, commanded him to be bound with two chains, and inquired who he was and what he had done.
- Acts 23:19 ἐπυνθάνετο impf mid/pass.dep ind 3sg The commanding officer took him by the hand, and going aside, asked him privately, "What is it that you have to tell me?"
- Acts 23:20 πυνθάνεσθαι pres mid/pass.dep inf He said, "The Jews have agreed to ask you to bring Paul down to the council tomorrow, as though intending to inquire somewhat more accurately concerning him.
- Acts 23:34 πυθόμενος aor mid.dep ptcp nom sg masc When the governor had read it, he asked what province he was from. When he understood that he was from Cilicia, he said,
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 πυνθανομαι centers on the idea of “to ask.” The word gravitates to Acts (64%), then Luke and Matthew. It turns up in 11 verses across 4 books, an uncommon footprint. First canonically at Matthew 2:4, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Dig into 11-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4441 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 →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #978
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 978 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 11 occurrences in the concordance →
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 11 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 9 verses · 82%
- Gospels 4 verses · 36%
- Johannine 1 verse · 9%
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: Asked 3×
- American Standard Version: Asked 2×, He inquired 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: He asked 3×, Ask 2×, Asked 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He asked 2×, He was asking 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4441 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 G4441 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 G4441 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 G4441 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 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 enquire, ask
- to ascertain, by enquiry
Word origin
Origin: middle voice prolonged from a primary putho (which occurs only as an alternate in certain tenses)
Middle voice prolonged from πύθω puthō a primary word (which occurs only as an alternate in certain tenses); to question that is ascertain by inquiry (as a matter of information merely; and thus differing from G2065 which properly means a request as a favor; and from G154 which is strictly a demand of something due; as well as from G2212 which implies a search for something hidden; and from G1189 which involves the idea of urgent need ); by implication to learn (by casual intelligence): - ask demand enquire understand.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G4441 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐπυνθάνετο epyntháneto | Verb, Imperfect, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Matthew 2:4 | 5 |
| ἐπυνθάνοντο epynthánonto | Verb, Imperfect, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Acts 4:7 | 2 |
| πυθόμενος pythómenos | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Acts 23:34 | 1 |
| πυνθάνεσθαι pynthánesthai | Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Infinitive | Acts 23:20 | 1 |
| πυνθάνομαι pynthánomai | Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Acts 10:29 | 1 |
| ἐπύθετο epýtheto | Verb, Aorist, Middle deponent, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | John 4:52 | 1 |
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πυνθανομαι appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 4 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 25:22 πυνθάνομαι
- 2 Chronicles 31:9 πυνθάνομαι
- Esther 6:4 πυνθάνομαι
- Daniel 2:15 πυνθάνομαι
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4441) 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.
- Genesis 25:22 πυνθάνομαι The children struggled together within her. She said, "If it be so, why do I live?" She went to inquire of Yahweh.
- 2 Chronicles 31:9 πυνθάνομαι Then Hezekiah questioned the priests and the Levites concerning the heaps.
- 2 Chronicles 32:31 πυνθάνομαι However in [the business of] the ambassadors of the princes of Babylon, who sent to him to inquire of the wonder that was done in the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart.
- Esther 6:4 πυνθάνομαι The king said, "Who is in the court?" Now Haman was come into the outward court of the king's house, to speak to the king to hang Mordecai on the gallows that he had prepared for him.
- Daniel 2:15 πυνθάνομαι he answered Arioch the king's captain, Why is the decree so urgent from the king? Then Arioch made the thing known to Daniel.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4441) 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.
