ἀτενίζω
to gaze upon
‘to gaze upon’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
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”).
- Infinitive
- A verbal noun (“to write”), unmarked for person or number.
- 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
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine 7 times (50%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive 2 times (14%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 2 times (14%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural 1 time (7%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 14 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G816 appears — 14 distinct verses across 3 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.
Luke 2 verses
- Luke 4:20 ἀτενίζοντες pres act ptcp nom pl masc He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fastened on him.
- Luke 22:56 ἀτενίσασα aor act ptcp nom sg fem A certain servant girl saw him as he sat in the light, and looking intently at him, said, "This man also was with him."
Acts 10 verses
- Acts 1:10 ἀτενίζοντες pres act ptcp nom pl masc While they were looking steadfastly into the sky as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white clothing,
- Acts 3:4 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc Peter, fastening his eyes on him, with John, said, "Look at us."
- Acts 3:12 ἀτενίζετε pres act ind 2pl When Peter saw it, he responded to the people, "You men of Israel, why do you marvel at this man? Why do you fasten your eyes on us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made him walk?
- Acts 6:15 ἀτενίσαντες aor act ptcp nom pl masc All who sat in the council, fastening their eyes on him, saw his face like it was the face of an angel.
- Acts 7:55 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc But he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God,
- Acts 10:4 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc He, fastening his eyes on him, and being frightened, said, "What is it, Lord?" He said to him, "Your prayers and your gifts to the needy have gone up for a memorial before God.
- Acts 11:6 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc When I had looked intently at it, I considered, and saw the four-footed animals of the earth, wild animals, creeping things, and birds of the sky.
- Acts 13:9 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc But Saul, who is also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, fastened his eyes on him,
- Acts 14:9 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc He was listening to Paul speaking, who, fastening eyes on him, and seeing that he had faith to be made whole,
- Acts 23:1 ἀτενίσας aor act ptcp nom sg masc Paul, looking steadfastly at the council, said, "Brothers, I have lived before God in all good conscience until this day."
2 Corinthians 2 verses
- 2 Corinthians 3:7 ἀτενίσαι aor act inf But if the service of death, written engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the children of Israel could not look steadfastly on the face of Moses for the glory of his face; which was passing away:
- 2 Corinthians 3:13 ἀτενίσαι aor act inf and not as Moses, who put a veil on his face, that the children of Israel wouldn't look steadfastly on the end of that which was passing away.
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 gaze upon” is the headline sense of the Greek verb ατενιζω (atenízō). It clusters heavily in Acts, which alone accounts for 71% of its uses. With 14 verses in 3 books, it is an uncommon word in the Greek New Testament. Scripture first uses it in Luke 4:20. Catalogued under 3 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G816 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #814
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 814 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 14 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 10 verses 71%
- Luke 2 verses 14%
- 2 Corinthians 2 verses 14%
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 14 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 12 verses · 86%
- Gospels 2 verses · 14%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 14%
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: Could 1×, Earnestly beholding 1×, Earnestly looked 1×
- American Standard Version: Look 2×, Looking 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Looked directly 3×, Looked intently 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Looking intently 5×, Gazing 2×, Look intently 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G816 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G816 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 G816 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G816 across 16 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.
Senses in Thayer's
The 3 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 fix the eyes on, gaze upon
- to look into anything
- metaph. to fix one's mind on one as an example
Word origin
Derived from Α (A) (G1) — alpha.
From a compound of G1 (as a particle of union) and τείνω teinō (to stretch ); to gaze intently : - behold earnestly (stedfastly) fasten (eyes) look (earnestly stedfastly up stedfastly) set eyes.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms G816 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀτενίσας atenísas | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Acts 3:4 | 7 |
| ἀτενίζοντες atenízontes | Verb, Present, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 4:20 | 2 |
| ἀτενίσαι atenísai | Verb, Aorist, Active, Infinitive | 2 Corinthians 3:7 | 2 |
| ἀτενίζετε atenízete | Verb, Present, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Plural | Acts 3:12 | 1 |
| ἀτενίσαντες atenísantes | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 6:15 | 1 |
| ἀτενίσασα atenísasa | Verb, Aorist, Active, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Luke 22:56 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G816, 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
- αβαρης abarḗs G4 light
- αβυσσος ábyssos G12 abyss
- αγαμος ágamos G22 unmarried
- αγενεαλογητος agenealógētos G35 without genealogy
- αγενης agenḗs G36 ignoble
- αγναφος ágnaphos G46 unprocessed
- αγνοεω agnoéō G50 to be ignorant
- αγνωσια agnōsía G56 ignorance
- αγνωστος ágnōstos G57 unknown
- αγραμματος agrámmatos G62 unlearned
- αγρυπνεω agrypnéō G69 to watch
- αδαπανος adápanos G77 free
- αδελφος adelphós G80 brother
- αδηλος ádēlos G82 obscure
- αδης háidēs G86 hell
- αδιακριτος adiákritos G87 clear
- αδιαλειπτος adiáleiptos G88 continual
- αδικος ádikos G94 unjust
- αδοκιμος adókimos G96 unapproved
- αδολος ádolos G97 guileless
- αδυνατος adýnatos G102 weak
- αζυμος ázymos G106 unleavened
- αθανασια athanasía G110 immortal
- αθεμιτος athémitos G111 unlawful
+149 more words share this root (not shown).
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 176 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
