πωλέω
to sell
‘to sell’ 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).
- 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
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G4453 appears in the Book of 1 Corinthians — 1 distinct verse. 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.
1 Corinthians
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.
“to sell” is the headline sense of the Greek verb πωλεω (pōléō). Translators differ — “sold” in the King James Version, then “selling” (Berean Standard Bible), as the renderings breakdown shows. It turns up in 20 verses across 7 books, an uncommon footprint. It concentrates in Luke, which alone accounts for 30% of its uses. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4453 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 →
- 20
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 20 distinct verses.
- 7 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 7 of 27 New Testament books.
- #586
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 586 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 20 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 20 distinct verses.
- Gospels 15 verses · 75%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 9 verses · 45%
- Johannine 3 verses · 15%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 5%
- Revelation 1 verse · 5%
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: Sold 11×, Sell 5×, Are 2×
- American Standard Version: Sold 11×, Sell 6×, Are 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Selling 7×, Sell 6×, Sold 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Selling 9×, Sell 5×, Sold 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4453 across 24 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 G4453 across 24 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4453 across 22 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G4453 across 24 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.
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 barter, to sell
- sellers
Word origin
Origin: probably ultimately from pelomai (to be busy, to trade)
Probably ultimately from πέλομαι pelomai (to be busy to trade ); to barter (as a pedlar ) that is to sell : - sell whatever is sold.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 16 distinct written forms G4453 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word πωλεω appears 12 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 11 verses in 8 books.
- 12
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 11
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 41:56 πωλέω
- Exodus 21:8 πωλέω
- Ezra 15:8 πωλέω
- Isaiah 24:2 πωλέω
- Ezekiel 7:12 πωλέω
- Joel 4:3 πωλέω
- Nahum 3:4 πωλέω
- Zechariah 11:5 πωλέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4453) 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 41:56 πωλέω The famine was over all the surface of the earth. Joseph opened all the store-houses, and sold to the Egyptians. The famine was severe in the land of Egypt.
- Genesis 42:6 πωλέω Joseph was the governor over the land. It was he who sold to all the people of the land. Joseph's brothers came, and bowed themselves down to him with their faces to the earth.
- Exodus 21:8 πωλέω If she doesn't please her master, who has married her to himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, seeing he has dealt deceitfully with her.
- Ezra 15:8 πωλέω
- Ezra 23:16 πωλέω
- Isaiah 24:2 πωλέω It shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the creditor, so with the debtor; as with the taker of interest, so with the giver of interest to him.
- Ezekiel 7:12 πωλέω The time is come, the day draws near: don't let the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn; for wrath is on all the multitude of it.
- Ezekiel 7:13 πωλέω For the seller shall not return to that which is sold, although they be yet alive: for the vision is touching the whole multitude of it, none shall return; neither shall any strengthen himself in the iniquity of his life.
- Joel 4:3 πωλέω
- Nahum 3:4 πωλέω because of the multitude of the prostitution of the alluring prostitute, the mistress of witchcraft, who sells nations through her prostitution, and families through her witchcraft.
- Zechariah 11:5 πωλέω Their buyers slaughter them, and go unpunished. Those who sell them say, 'Blessed be Yahweh, for I am rich;' and their own shepherds don't pity them.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4453) 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.
