σαπρός
rotten
‘rotten’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Nominative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Gender
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
4 distinct verses where G4550 appears in the Nominative case, across 3 books. 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 2 verses
Luke 1 verse
Ephesians 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.
“rotten” is the headline sense of the Greek adjective σαπρος (saprós). More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Matthew. The Greek New Testament uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. Its English rendering has broadened — “corrupt” classically, “bad” (Berean Standard Bible) and “rotten” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4550 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,240
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,240 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Gospels 5 verses · 83%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 17%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 17%
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: Corrupt 6×
- American Standard Version: Corrupt 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bad 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Rotten 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4550 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4550 across 8 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4550 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 G4550 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 3 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.
- rotten, putrefied
- corrupted by one and no longer fit for use, worn out
- of poor quality, bad, unfit for use, worthless
Word origin
Derived from σηπω (sḗpō) (G4595) — to corrupt.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G4550 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| σαπρὸν sapròn | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Matthew 7:17 | 4 |
| σαπρόν saprón | Adjective, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 12:33 | 2 |
| σαπρὰ saprà | Adjective, Accusative, Plural, Neuter | Matthew 13:48 | 1 |
| σαπρὸς sapròs | Adjective, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Ephesians 4:29 | 1 |
