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σημεῖον

sign

‘sign’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

G4592 Strong's Greek
sēmeîon Transliteration
/say-mi'-on/ 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.

σημειον (sēmeîon) is a Greek noun most often rendered “sign.” It first appears in Matthew 12:38. Spanning 69 verses in 11 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Greek New Testament. John dominates its distribution — 17 of 69 verses. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
miracle
Modern gloss
sign
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 G4592 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 →

69
distinct verses
The word appears in 69 distinct verses.
11 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 11 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 12:38
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 12:38.
Revelation 19:20
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Revelation 19:20.
#220
by frequency
Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 220 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 69 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 41 · 59%
  • Acts 13 · 19%
  • Pauline Epistles 7 · 10%
  • General Epistles 1 · 1%
  • Revelation 7 · 10%

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 69 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 41 verses · 59%
  • Johannine 24 verses · 35%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 22 verses · 32%
  • Pauline corpus 7 verses · 10%
  • Revelation 7 verses · 10%
  • 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: Sign 26×, Signs 21×, Miracles 13×
  • American Standard Version: Signs 34×, Sign 30×, Miracle 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Signs 37×, Sign 31×, Miracle 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Signs 39×, Sign 38×, A 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4592 across 76 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Sign” 26×
  • “Signs” 21×
  • “Miracles” 13×
  • “Miracle” 7×
  • “Shall be the sign” 2×
  • “Wonder” 2×

Plus 5 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 1 further occurrence.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G4592 across 77 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Signs” 34×
  • “Sign” 30×
  • “Miracle” 3×

Plus 10 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 G4592 across 74 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Signs” 37×
  • “Sign” 31×
  • “Miracle” 2×

Plus 4 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 2 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4592 across 79 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Signs” 39×
  • “Sign” 38×
  • “A” 2×

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.

  1. that by which a person or a thing is distinguished from others and is known
  2. a sign, prodigy, portent, i.e. an unusual occurrence, transcending the common course of nature

Word origin

Derived from σημαινω (sēmaínō) (G4591) — to signify.

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 10:20,1

Neuter of a presumed derivative of the base of G4591 ; an indication especially ceremonially or supernaturally : - miracle sign token wonder.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 5 distinct written forms G4592 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
σημεῖον sēmeîon Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 12:38 37
σημεῖα sēmeîa Noun, Accusative, Plural, Neuter Matthew 16:3 32
σημείοις sēmeíois Noun, Dative, Plural, Neuter Acts 2:22 4
σημείων sēmeíōn Noun, Genitive, Plural, Neuter Mark 16:20 3
σημεῖόν sēmeîón Noun, Accusative, Singular, Neuter 1 Corinthians 14:22 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4592, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word σημειον appears 97 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 94 verses in 16 books.

97
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
94
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
16 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 16 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4592) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 94. 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 (G4592) 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.