σοφίζω
to make wise
‘to make wise’ 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
- 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
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
- Passive
- The subject receives the action.
Mood
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G4679 appears in the Book of 2 Timothy — 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.
2 Timothy
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 make wise” is the headline sense of the Greek verb σοφιζω (sophízō). With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Greek New Testament vocabulary. More than half of its appearances fall in 2 Timothy. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Timothy 3:15. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4679 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 2 of 27 New Testament books.
- #2,678
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Greek words (rank 2,678 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 1 verse · 50%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 50%
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: Cunningly devised 1×, Make 1×, Wise 1×
- American Standard Version: Cunningly devised 1×, Make 1×, Wise 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cleverly devised 1×, Make you wise 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cleverly invented 1×, Make 1×, Wise 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4679 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4679 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4679 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4679 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 make wise, teach
- to become wise, to have understanding
Word origin
Derived from σοφος (sophós) (G4680) — wise.
From G4680 ; to render wise ; in a sinister acceptation to form sophisms that is continue plausible error : - cunningly devised make wise.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G4679 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| σεσοφισμένοις sesophisménois | Verb, Perfect, Passive, Participle, Dative, Plural, Masculine | 2 Peter 1:16 | 1 |
| σοφίσαι sophísai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | 2 Timothy 3:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4679, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word σοφιζω appears 11 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 10 verses in 5 books.
- 11
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 10
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- 1 Samuel 3:8 σοφίζω
- 1 Kings 5:11 σοφίζω
- Psalms 18:8 σοφίζω
- Proverbs 16:13 σοφίζω
- Ecclesiastes 2:15 σοφίζω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4679) 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.
- 1 Samuel 3:8 σοφίζω Yahweh called Samuel again the third time. He arose and went to Eli, and said, Here am I; for you called me. Eli perceived that Yahweh had called the child.
- 1 Kings 5:11 σοφίζω Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.
- Psalms 18:8 σοφίζω Smoke went out of his nostrils. Consuming fire came out of his mouth. Coals were kindled by it.
- Psalms 104:22 σοφίζω The sun rises, and they steal away, And lay down in their dens.
- Psalms 118:98 σοφίζω
- Proverbs 16:13 σοφίζω Righteous lips are the delight of kings. They value one who speaks the truth.
- Ecclesiastes 2:15 σοφίζω Then said I in my heart, "As it happens to the fool, so will it happen even to me; and why was I then more wise?" Then said I in my heart that this also is vanity.
- Ecclesiastes 2:19 σοφίζω Who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have rule over all of my labor in which I have labored, and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity.
- Ecclesiastes 7:16 σοφίζω Don't be overly righteous, neither make yourself overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself?
- Ecclesiastes 7:23 σοφίζω All this have I proved in wisdom. I said, "I will be wise;" but it was far from me.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4679) 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.
