to strike or beat: to hit someone with a blow, often blow after blow
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
At its core this is the plain word for hitting: to land a blow with the hand, the fist, a reed, or a staff, and usually blow after blow rather than a single hit. The New Testament uses it most often for beating a person, whether in mockery, in a beating handed out by a master or a mob, or in the abuse that Jesus and Paul endured.
Two uses reach beyond simple assault. People strike their own chests as a visible sign of sorrow or repentance, the gesture the tax collector makes as he prays and the crowd makes as they turn away from the cross. And Paul can speak of striking someone's conscience, turning a word for bodily violence into a picture of the real harm a stronger believer does when he wounds a weaker one.
Close relatives sharpen the picture. πατάσσω tends to name a single decisive or even deadly blow, while δέρω leans toward a thrashing or flogging. This word sits between them as the everyday verb for hitting or beating.
Nuances
1ato beat or strike a person: to rain blows on someone in violence, mockery, or punishment
Describes a sustained pounding rather than one stroke: a master laying into his servants, soldiers hitting the same head again and again, a crowd working a man over until they are pulled off.Mat 24:49Mrk 15:19Luk 12:45Act 21:32
The blows land where they shame: the head, the face, the mouth, the cheek of someone who cannot hit back.Mat 27:30Luk 6:29Luk 22:64Act 23:2
Turned on oneself, it is the gesture of grief and repentance, a person beating his own chest before God or on the way home from a death.Luk 18:13Luk 23:48
Stretches to a blow that is not physical at all: bruising the tender conscience of a fellow believer counts as hitting him.1Co 8:12
Both
Both name a real physical blow landed on a person's body by human hands in a moment of violence.Mat 26:51Luk 22:50Act 18:17Act 21:32
Both are normally rendered "struck" in English, so nothing in the translation tells a reader whether one killing stroke or a steady beating is meant.Act 7:24Act 23:2
Names one decisive stroke that fells the person hit, so the blow and the death are told as a single act.Act 7:24Act 12:23
The one who strikes is often God or an angel acting for him, whether to rouse a sleeping man, to cut down a proud king, or to let the shepherd fall so the flock scatters.Mat 26:31Mrk 14:27Act 12:7Act 12:23
Used of a blow struck with a drawn sword, where the question on the spot is whether to use the sword at all.Mat 26:51Luk 22:49Luk 22:50
Takes whole peoples and the earth itself as its target, struck with plagues or with the weapon of final judgment.Rev 11:6Rev 19:15
δέρωto thrash or flog; a beating given as punishment, harder and more deliberate than an ordinary blow
Names an official flogging or scourging carried out as punishment, the sustained thrashing an authority inflicts on a prisoner.Act 5:40Act 22:19Luk 12:47
Is the standard word for the beating of the sent servants in the vineyard parable, a repeated pattern of messengers thrashed and driven off.Mat 21:35Mrk 12:3Luk 20:10
Stretches to a figurative thrashing, the aimless flailing of a boxer who beats the air instead of landing on a target.1Co 9:26
κολαφίζωto hit with the fist, to punch; names the manner of the blow where this word stays general
tuptō in the other biblical languages
נָכָהHebrew“to smite”the broad Hebrew verb for striking, ranging from a single blow to a fatal one; this Greek word is narrower and rarely means to kill
Its usual scene is a human being taking a beating from other people: soldiers hitting Jesus over the head with a reed, a crowd laying into a synagogue ruler, a high priest ordering that Paul be hit on the mouth.Mat 27:30Act 18:17Act 23:2
It covers the gesture of hitting one's own chest as a sign of sorrow or repentance, a blow aimed at oneself rather than at an enemy.Luk 18:13Luk 23:48
It can leave the body altogether and name harm done where no hand lands: Paul says that pushing a weaker believer against his conscience is striking that conscience.1Co 8:12
Both
Both name real physical blows landed on a person's body, which is why English Bibles reach for the same words, "beat" and "smite", when they render either one.Pro 23:35Mat 27:30
Both usually picture blows that keep landing rather than one quick tap, whether a master laying into the servants or hooves pounding the ground again and again.Jdg 5:22Luk 12:45
A hammer stands behind it. It is the word for a metalworker pounding at the anvil, for a tent peg driven through a sleeping man's skull, for carved paneling smashed apart with axes.Isa 41:7Jdg 5:26Psa 74:6
What it hits is more often a thing than a person: the woodwork of the sanctuary, the choice vines of a conquered land, the ground under galloping hooves.Psa 74:6Isa 16:8Jdg 5:22
It can put something other than a person behind the blow, as when wine is what has laid the leaders of Ephraim flat.Isa 28:1
The blow it names can even be wanted: the psalmist asks a good man to hit him hard and calls that stroke a kindness.Psa 141:5
Most of its verses are one person beating another, which the Hebrew word never reports: soldiers hitting Jesus on the head, a master beating the servants under him, a mob beating Paul until the soldiers arrive.Mat 27:30Mat 24:49Act 21:32
It usually pictures blows that keep coming rather than one sharp smack, so English versions often reach for "kept beating" where the Hebrew word gives a single crack of the hands.Luk 22:64Act 18:17
It covers the insulting hit on the face, from the slap Jesus tells his followers not to return to the blow a high priest orders in a hearing, aimed at a person's standing as much as at his body.Luk 6:29Act 23:2
It turns figurative in a way the Hebrew word never does: Paul says a believer who pushes a weaker one into eating what troubles him strikes that man's conscience, and no hand is involved.1Co 8:12
Both
Each is an ordinary word in its own language for landing a blow with the hand, and English versions render both with "strike" or "smite".Mat 27:30Num 24:10
Both name a blow a person lands on his own body to show grief or shame, striking the chest in Greek and slapping the thigh in Hebrew, and in each language that is the standard way to picture the sorrow.Luk 18:13Luk 23:48Jer 31:19Ezk 21:12
In both, God can be the one who strikes, delivering a blow as judgment on the wicked.Act 23:3Job 34:26
Its commonest use is clapping the palms together as a public verdict on someone else, so the person is struck by the message rather than by the hand: onlookers clap over the fallen wicked, and those who pass by clap at the ruins of Jerusalem.Job 27:23Lam 2:15Job 34:37
It can report a flash of temper spent in the hands, as when Balak strikes his hands together at Balaam for blessing Israel instead of cursing it.Num 24:10
The same Hebrew spelling also carries a completely unrelated word meaning "to be enough", which the Greek verb has no share in: Ben-hadad boasts that Samaria's rubble will not supply a handful of dirt for each soldier in his army.1Ki 20:10
What the Hebrew verb pictures is genuinely uncertain in its hardest lines, whereas the Greek word's sense is never in doubt: versions give clapping, splashing, and wallowing for what a drunken Moab does in his own vomit, and they disagree over whether Judah strikes hands with foreigners or simply has more than enough of them.Jer 48:26Isa 2:6
What scholars say about tuptō
BDAG glosses τύπτω as to strike, beat, wound, and gathers its New Testament range under one head: literal blows to a person (Matthew 27:30;Acts 23:2), the reflexive breast-beating gesture of grief or contrition (Luke 18:13;Luke 23:48), and the figurative injury to the conscience in 1 Corinthians 8:12. The imperfect forms in the beating scenes (ἔτυπτον in Acts 18:17; ἔτυπτεν in Luke 18:13) carry durative force, blow upon blow. LSJ documents the same field in classical Greek, and Louw and Nida place the word in the general domain of striking. It never became the standard word for a fatal blow, a role that falls to πατάσσω and, in the Septuagint's rendering of Hebrew נכה, to a wider set of verbs.
Sources
BDAG, s.v. τύπτωlexicon
LSJ, s.v. τύπτωlexicon
Louw & Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §19.1-19.3lexicon