paraptōma

Outside the Bible this word started out mild. It meant a slip, a blunder, a miscalculation: a general's bad strategy, a clerk's error in the tax accounts, a flaw in a piece of writing. The picture inside the word is of stumbling or falling off to the side of the path you were meant to walk. But by the time the New Testament writers use it, that picture is only faint background. The Greek translators of the Old Testament had already loaded the word with full moral weight, using it to render some of Hebrew's strongest terms for deliberate, faithless rebellion against God. So in the New Testament it is not a softer word for sin. It carries the same force as the ordinary words for sin and transgression.

At its heart it always names a definite act. It is sin pictured as a specific thing a person did, a particular false step taken, rather than sin pictured as a power or a condition. That is why it so often appears in the plural, counting up the individual wrongs that have to be forgiven, and why Paul can speak of one single such act, the one Adam committed, as the doorway through which sin entered the world.

The senses below are not different meanings. They are the same act of wrongdoing seen in two settings: the wrong done against God that needs his pardon, and the wrong done against another person that we are told to forgive as we have been forgiven. The fall imagery survives only as a turn of phrase a writer can play on, never as a way of making the offense sound small.