συκοφαντέω
to accuse wrongfully
‘to accuse wrongfully’ 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).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G4811 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 3:14 συκοφαντήσητε aor act subj 2pl Soldiers also asked him, saying, "What about us? What must we do?" He said to them, "Extort from no one by violence, neither accuse anyone wrongfully. Be content with your wages."
- Luke 19:8 ἐσυκοφάντησα aor act ind 1sg Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, half of my goods I give to the poor. If I have wrongfully exacted anything of anyone, I restore four times as much."
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.
At its core, συκοφαντεω (sykophantéō) means “to accuse wrongfully.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 2 verses. The word gravitates to Luke (100%). Scripture first uses it in Luke 3:14. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4811 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.
- 1 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Luke 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Gospels 2 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 100%
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: Accuse any falsely 1×, False accusation 1×, I have taken 1×
- American Standard Version: Accuse 1×, Any one wrongfully 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: False accusation 1×, I have cheated 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Accuse falsely 1×, Do 1×, I have defrauded 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4811 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4811 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4811 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4811 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 accuse wrongfully, to calumniate, to attack by malicious devices
- to exact money wrongfully
Word origin
Derived from συκον (sŷkon) (G4810) — fig.
From a compound of G4810 and a derivative of G5316 ; to be a fig informer (reporter of the law forbidding the exportation of figs from Greece) sycopant that is (generally and by extension) to defraud ( exact unlawfully extort ): - accuse falsely take by false accusation.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G4811 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| συκοφαντήσητε sykophantḗsēte | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Plural | Luke 3:14 | 1 |
| ἐσυκοφάντησα esykophántēsa | Verb, Aorist, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Luke 19:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4811, 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 συκοφαντεω appears 8 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 7 verses in 6 books.
- 8
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 7
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 43:18 συκοφαντέω
- Leviticus 19:11 συκοφαντέω
- Job 35:9 συκοφαντέω
- Psalms 118:122 συκοφαντέω
- Proverbs 22:16 συκοφαντέω
- Ecclesiastes 4:1 συκοφαντέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G4811) 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.
- Genesis 43:18 συκοφαντέω The men were afraid, because they were brought to Joseph's house; and they said, "Because of the money that was returned in our sacks at the first time are we brought in; that he may seek occasion against us, and fall on us, and take us for bondservants, along with our donkeys."
- Leviticus 19:11 συκοφαντέω "'You shall not steal; neither shall you deal falsely, nor lie to one another.
- Job 35:9 συκοφαντέω "By reason of the multitude of oppressions they cry out; They cry for help by reason of the arm of the mighty.
- Psalms 118:122 συκοφαντέω
- Proverbs 22:16 συκοφαντέω Whoever oppresses the poor for his own increase and whoever gives to the rich, Both come to poverty.
- Proverbs 28:3 συκοφαντέω A needy man who oppresses the poor Is like a driving rain which leaves no crops.
- Ecclesiastes 4:1 συκοφαντέω Then I returned and saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and, behold, the tears of those who were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G4811) 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.
