epiginōskō

This is the everyday, down-to-earth side of the word: a focused act of knowing that lands on a definite object. The eye or ear catches enough to say, that is the man, that is the voice, that is the place. The Gospels use it again and again for people recognizing Jesus or his disciples (a crowd making him out, a servant girl knowing Peter's voice, sailors failing to recognize a coastline), and for Jesus knowing exactly what was going on inside the people around him.

The same word reaches past the senses into deliberate inquiry. A Roman officer wants to find out the charge against a prisoner; Luke writes so his reader may know for certain the things he was taught. Whether the knowing comes through sight, through sound, or through investigation, the common thread is that it is aimed and arrives at a settled result.

These two shades, recognizing a person or thing and ascertaining a fact, belong together: in both, a person fixes on something and comes to know it for sure. The prefix added to the simpler verb for knowing tends to sharpen the word toward this directed, definite sense rather than knowledge in general.

Alongside the plain act of recognizing, the word carries a weightier use, especially in the letters. Here the knowing is not just spotting or finding out; it is a full, committed knowing that shapes how a person lives. Paul tells the Corinthians he hopes they will know him completely, and that one day he himself will know God as fully as he is already known. To know the truth in this sense is to have embraced it, which is why turning away from it afterward is treated as so grave.

This fuller knowing often has a moral edge. The word can mean to acknowledge: to grant something its due weight and respond to it. Believers acknowledge faithful workers; the church is told to recognize that an apostle's instructions carry the Lord's authority; people are urged to recognize that Christ is in them.

Whether this heavier use is truly a separate meaning or just the same recognizing applied to large, life-defining objects is a matter of judgment, but the loaded knowing of God and of the truth in the letters reads as more than mere recognition.