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σκότος

darkness

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

G4655 Strong's Greek
skótos Transliteration
/skot'-os/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 31 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.

σκοτος — transliterated skótos — is a Greek noun carrying the sense “darkness.” Debuting at Matthew 4:16, it then recurs through the corpus. The Greek New Testament uses it across 30 verses — moderately common. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. It shares a root with σκια, σκοτεινος and σκοτια. See the sense tree, 30-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
darkness
Modern gloss
darkness
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current Thayer scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G4655 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 →

30
distinct verses
The word appears in 30 distinct verses.
15 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 15 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 4:16
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 4:16.
Jude 1:13
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Jude 1:13.
#448
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 448 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 30 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 12 · 40%
  • Acts 3 · 10%
  • Pauline Epistles 11 · 37%
  • General Epistles 4 · 13%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

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 30 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 12 verses · 40%
  • Pauline corpus 11 verses · 37%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 7 verses · 23%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 13%
  • Johannine 2 verses · 7%

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: Darkness 30×
  • American Standard Version: Darkness 31×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Darkness 30×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Darkness 30×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G4655 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Darkness” 30×

Plus 2 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 G4655 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Darkness” 31×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G4655 across 30 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Darkness” 30×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G4655 across 31 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Darkness” 30×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.

  1. darkness
  2. metaph.

Word origin

Derived from σκια (skiá) (G4639) — shadow.

Part of speech: Noun Neuter TDNT: 14:03,1

From the base of G4639 ; shadiness that is obscurity (literally or figuratively): - darkness.

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


Forms in the corpus

The 3 distinct written forms G4655 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
σκότος skótos Noun, Nominative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 6:23 14
σκότους skótous Noun, Genitive, Singular, Neuter Luke 22:53 12
σκότει skótei Noun, Dative, Singular, Neuter Matthew 4:16 5

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4655, 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 → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word σκοτος appears 98 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 91 verses in 20 books.

98
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
91
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
20 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 20 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4655) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 91. 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 (G4655) 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.