αἷμα

αἷμα (haima, "HY-mah"), blood, and the record shows where this corpus counts it most: 929 occurrences across 106 works. Its heaviest single-work attestation is Leviticus (82), then the Iliad (80), followed by Ezechiel (48), the Odyssey (36), Exodus (27), and Orestes (26). The record gives these as counts alone, without cited lines, so the profile itself is the evidence: this is where the word gathers most densely in the corpus, and no attested passage is matched to characterize any single scene.

LSJ (Liddell–Scott–Jones, 1940) records the widening of sense: from blood itself, to streams of blood, to bloodshed and murder, and then to blood as kinship — one's blood, one's descent, the blood-relation. The same word that names the fluid names the family. Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill 2010) glosses it simply "blood."

The strangest fact about the word is also the honest heart of its biography, and the record carries it. In Frisk's account (Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1960–72), αἷμα is not the inherited Indo-European word for blood at all. That older word, Frisk notes, was probably avoided "as a result of linguistic taboo" — the true name of blood felt too dangerous to say — and αἷμα moved in to replace it. So the ordinary Greek word for blood may itself be a substitution, a word reached for because the first one could not be spoken. Beekes (2010) and Chantraine (Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, 1968–80) both treat the lemma, but the record settles no single agreed root beneath the replacement.

If the plain word for blood is already standing in for a name too dangerous to speak, what was it about blood the older word knew?