The corpus record

αἶα

aia

horrible

Generated live from the audited corpus — every figure on this page is a database query, not prose from memory.

Where it lives

Persians 8 · 15.71/10k
Suppliant Maidens 3 · 6.22/10k
Iphigenia in Tauris 3 · 3.62/10k
Shield of Heracles 1 · 3.09/10k
Hecuba 2 · 2.79/10k
Electra 2 · 2.65/10k
Agamemnon 2 · 2.47/10k
Seven Against Thebes 1 · 1.99/10k
Eumenides 1 · 1.91/10k
Works and Days 1 · 1.73/10k
Prometheus Bound 1 · 1.7/10k
Odyssey 14 · 1.61/10k

Densest 12 of 19 attested works shown, by occurrences per 10,000 attested tokens.

What it meant

αἰᾶ · aia — Beekes

αἰᾶ νής [adj.| ‘horrible’ (Archil.); the mg. ‘eternal’ (A.) through association with » αἰεί. *VAR Ion. αἰηνής. *ETYM There is a speculative hypothesis by Wackernagel 1897: 7, who assumed the reconstruction *oatp-avij¢ ‘with terrifying face’ (whence Lat. saevus, the word for ‘face’ seen in » ἀπηνής, etc.). See Degani Helikon 2 (1962): 37-56. — [Beekes, s.v. αἰᾶ, p. 78]

In the wild

αἶαν · aian Aeschylus, Agamemnon 108–120
αἴας · aias Aeschylus, Agamemnon 429–431
αἶα · aia Aeschylus, Eumenides 57–59
αἶʼ · aiʼ Aeschylus, Persians 645–646
αἶα · aia Aeschylus, Persians 1074
αἶαν · aian Aeschylus, Persians 1–7

6 of 59 attestations shown. Ask for more.

Where it came from

Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill 2010) Treated in Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill 2010) s.v. αἶα (scan p. 78; entry #192).

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