σωφρονέω
to be sober
‘to be sober’ 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 Present-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
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
- Imperative
- Expresses a command or request.
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Case
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive 2 times (33%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Singular, Masculine 2 times (33%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G4993 appears — 6 distinct verses across 6 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.
Mark 1 verse
Luke 1 verse
Romans 1 verse
2 Corinthians 1 verse
Titus 1 verse
1 Peter 1 verse
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.
σωφρονεω (sōphronéō) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to be sober.” Debuting at Mark 5:15, it then recurs through the corpus. The Greek New Testament uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. Related forms include σωφρων, σωφρονιζω and σωφρονως. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G4993 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 6 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,476
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,476 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
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 6 distinct verses.
- Pauline corpus 3 verses · 50%
- Gospels 2 verses · 33%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 17%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 17%
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: Right mind 2×
- American Standard Version: Right mind 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Right mind 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Being sound minded 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G4993 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G4993 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G4993 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G4993 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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 be in one's right mind
- to exercise self control
Word origin
Derived from σωφρων (sṓphrōn) (G4998) — self-controlled.
From G4998 ; to be of sound mind that is sane (figuratively) moderate : - be in right mind be sober (minded) soberly.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G4993 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| σωφρονεῖν sōphroneîn | Verb, Present, Active, Infinitive | Romans 12:3 | 2 |
| σωφρονοῦντα sōphronoûnta | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Mark 5:15 | 2 |
| σωφρονήσατε sōphronḗsate | Verb, Aorist, Active, Imperative, 2nd person, Plural | 1 Peter 4:7 | 1 |
| σωφρονοῦμεν sōphronoûmen | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 1st person, Plural | 2 Corinthians 5:13 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G4993, 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
- σωφρονιζω sōphronízō G4994 to admonish
- σωφρονως sōphrónōs G4996 soberly
- σωφροσυνη sōphrosýnē G4997 self-control
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
