σπαράσσω
to convulse
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-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).
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
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.
- Neuter
- Grammatically neuter.
Number
- Singular
- One.
2 distinct verses where G4682 appears in the Aorist tense, across 1 book. 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.
Mark 2 verses
- Mark 1:26 σπαράξαν aor act ptcp nom sg neut The unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.
- Mark 9:26 σπαράξας aor act ptcp nom sg masc Having cried out, and convulsed greatly, it came out of him. The boy became like one dead; so much that most of them said, "He is dead."
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.
σπαρασσω — transliterated sparássō — is a Greek verb carrying the sense “to convulse.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Mark. Debuting at Mark 1:26, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with σπαω, σπειρω and σπαργανοω. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4682 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 →
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.
- Gospels 3 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 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: Had torn 1×, Rent 1×, Tare 1×
- American Standard Version: Tare 1×, Teareth 1×, Tearing 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Convulsing him violently 1×, Threw into convulsions 1×, Throws him into convulsions 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Having convulsed 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4682 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4682 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4682 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4682 across 4 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 1 sense 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 convulse, tear
Word origin
Derived from σπαω (spáō) (G4685) — to draw.
Prolongation from σπαίρω spairō̄ (to gasp ; apparently strengthened from G4685 through the idea of spasmodic contraction); to mangle that is convulse with epilepsy : - rend tear.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G4682 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| σπαράξαν sparáxan | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Neuter | Mark 1:26 | 1 |
| σπαράξας sparáxas | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Mark 9:26 | 1 |
| σπαράσσει sparássei | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Singular | Luke 9:39 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4682, 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
Derived from this word
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 σπαρασσω appears 3 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 3 verses in 3 books.
- 3
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 3
- 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
- 2 Samuel 22:8 σπαράσσω
- Jeremiah 4:19 σπαράσσω
- Daniel 8:7 σπαράσσω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4682) 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.
- 2 Samuel 22:8 σπαράσσω Then the earth shook and trembled, The foundations of heaven quaked Were shaken, because he was angry.
- Jeremiah 4:19 σπαράσσω My anguish, my anguish! I am pained at my very heart; my heart is disquieted in me; I can't hold my peace; because you have heard, O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.
- Daniel 8:7 σπαράσσω I saw him come close to the ram, and he was moved with anger against him, and struck the ram, and broke his two horns; and there was no power in the ram to stand before him; but he cast him down to the ground, and trampled on him; and there was none who could deliver the ram out of his hand.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4682) 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.
