σκοτόω
to darken
‘to darken’ 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 Perfect-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
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Perfect
- A completed past action with continuing present results.
Voice
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Perfect, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Perfect, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G4656 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Ephesians 1 verse
Revelation 2 verses
- Revelation 9:2 ἐσκοτώθη aor pass ind 3sg He opened the pit of the abyss, and smoke went up out of the pit, like the smoke from a burning furnace. The sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke from the pit.
- Revelation 16:10 ἐσκοτωμένη perf pass ptcp nom sg fem The fifth poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and his kingdom was darkened. They gnawed their tongues because of the pain,
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 σκοτοω centers on the idea of “to darken.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 3 verses. Revelation dominates its distribution — 2 of 3 verses. Its earliest occurrence is Ephesians 4:18. Thayer's distinguishes 2 senses for it. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4656 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,203
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,203 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Revelation 2 verses 67%
- Ephesians 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Johannine 2 verses · 67%
- Revelation 2 verses · 67%
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 33%
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: Full of darkness 1×
- American Standard Version: Darkened 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Plunged into darkness 1×, They are darkened 1×, Were darkened 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Darkened 1×, They have been darkened 1×, Were darkened 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4656 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4656 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4656 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4656 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 darken, cover with darkness
- metaph. to darken or blind the mind
Word origin
Derived from σκοτος (skótos) (G4655) — darkness.
From G4655 ; to obscure or blind (literally or figuratively): - be full of darkness.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G4656 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἐσκοτωμένη eskotōménē | Verb, Perfect, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Revelation 16:10 | 1 |
| ἐσκοτωμένοι eskotōménoi | Verb, Perfect, Passive, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Ephesians 4:18 | 1 |
| ἐσκοτώθη eskotṓthē | Verb, Aorist, Passive, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Revelation 9:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4656, 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
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word σκοτοω appears 5 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 5 verses in 3 books.
- 5
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 5
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Judges 4:21 σκοτόω
- Job 3:9 σκοτόω
- Jeremiah 8:21 σκοτόω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4656) 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.
- Judges 4:21 σκοτόω Then Jael Heber's wife took a tent-pin, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him, and struck the pin into his temples, and it pierced through into the ground; for he was in a deep sleep; so he swooned and died.
- Job 3:9 σκοτόω Let the stars of the twilight of it be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, Neither let it see the eyelids of the morning,
- Job 30:30 σκοτόω My skin grows black and peels from me. My bones are burned with heat.
- Jeremiah 8:21 σκοτόω For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt: I mourn; dismay has taken hold on me.
- Jeremiah 14:2 σκοτόω Judah mourns, and the gates of it languish, they sit in black on the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4656) 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.
